Gothic
by author-self-insert
Summary: Ten years ago, Edward was accused of murder and Bella was his alibi. Now, the murder remains unsolved and Bella hates Edward. Can a penchant for gothic mystery, a hearty dose of lingering hostility and the desire for a clean conscience really be enough to right old wrongs? AH
1. Chapter 1

**Meyer owns all**

**FANFIC TIMES**

_All the news that the others won't print_

_Murder of Local Girl Remains Unsolved_

By Ambrose Bierce

Forks and Port Angeles continue to mourn the death of local teen…

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_City Debates Fate of Abandoned Cabin_

By T. de Quincey

Complaints of vandalism and wild parties have once again prompted the city to question…

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_Gothic_

A weekly serial written by author-self-insert

"Prologue"

I had always imagined that I would wake up in a dungeon one day.

I had imagined chains and manacles. Or at least handcuffs. I had imagined floggers, too, made from rabbit fur, or rather _faux_ rabbit, for of course my dungeon would be (animal) cruelty free.

With compliments to the Marquis de Sade, fantasies of sex dungeons are _de rigueur_ when you study the Gothic.

But I certainly never imagined that Edward Cullen would be locked inside the dungeon with me.

And if I may say so, it was all decidedly less sexy than I'd hoped.

**AN: Occasional breaks in the narrative will occur in the form of "fake" chapters with "articles" and "advertisements," in keeping with the inspiration of the gothic serials that would appear chapter by chapter in weekly or monthly periodicals, buried amongst news and ads. Yes I know that this breaks up the narrative (rules are boring). Yes I know that not everyone will like this and that's okay (we're all different). If you are one of these people, and the appearance of a "fake" chapter and the effort required to click "Next" a second time is too much to bear, but you still really want to read this story for some reason, rest assured once it's completed, I plan to post a separate version minus "fake" chapters for the narrative purists (if such a thing as a "purist" can possibly exist in fanfic). **

**~ 23 chapters**

**~ 2000 – 4000 word chapters**

**Weekly updates – But be forewarned, I am a card carrying member of the La Push Cliff Jumping Club, and cliffhangers fit in well with my theme of the Gothic, stories in the vein of which were often published in a serial format with suspenseful "endings" intended to keep the reader returning each week. So if you have a fear of heights, you may want to wait until the Complete button has been selected.**

**Unbetaed**

**Rated M for language, weak attempts at politically incorrect humor here and there (I've been told that I'm mean and/or my Bella is mean), and a lemon in the far off distant future. There are references to acts of violence and literary works of horror, but no grisly descriptions. And alas, despite the above, no BDSM.**

**Mostly BPOV**

**I've been told that I make a lot of obscure references. You can "solve" this murder case without looking any of them up. If you want to know what something means, feel free to PM me. I'll probably just tell you that I picked it from Google at random. Reading should be fun—I like it when a writer can throw something at me that I don't recognize, it adds to the aura of mystery. Best!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Meyer owns all**

Chapter 1

'_Ask what you please, and I will tell you everything. But my story is simply one of bewilderment and darkness.' Sheridan LeFanu_

BPOV

"I want to know how he's changed," Alice said.

"He hasn't. People don't change," I warned her.

"Bullshit. _We've_ changed."

I snorted, not wanting to have this debate, but she continued nonetheless. "All of the cells in our bodies get replaced a million times a day so we must change."

"I don't think that's how it works," I hazarded.

She waved a hand dismissively.

"He won't remember you," I said.

"Isn't that the point? That we all grow up and get over that crap?" she asked, smoothing down her dress.

I huffed. Far be it from me to stop anyone from doing as they pleased, even if they were being entirely irrational.

Besides, maybe she was right. Maybe _she_ had changed. After all, she was sitting at the bar wearing a fucking Versace dress, a fact that I would not have known had she not have informed me of it upon her arrival. I suspected that she'd worn Versace for precisely this reason, so that she could name drop, and because the frock was a staid _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ number that made her look as if she had _arrived._ It wasn't exactly Alice's usual avant garde fare. She was still the same underneath, however. In fact, I was sure that she was still the same on the surface—she could have sewn that hackneyed Versace design with her eyes closed in high school. But back then she was a freak and now she owned a boutique.

I hadn't changed though. I was exactly the same. Staying true to myself even if everyone else was being a hypocrite. I might have gotten over the oversized jeans and flannels that had once served me so well, but I wasn't walking around in fuck-me heels and fishnet stockings trying to make up for a misspent youth. I dressed like a mature tax-paying adult, most of the time anyhow. At that very moment, for instance, I happened to be wearing a schoolmarmish white top with fancy pleats, a black cardigan, a narrow black skirt with buttons up the side and Mary Jane loafers. I might have been trying to fulfill some retro noir fantasy, but it was work appropriate and not even skin tight at a size 8.

I wasn't surprised by Alice's behavior, unfortunately. To be sure, I was the one responsible for her invitation to this particular happy hour. The ramifications for not extending this invite would have been serious. The mixer had been occasioned by the arrival of a certain Jasper Hale to the department and, therefore, should probably have been limited to faculty, adjuncts and secretaries, but we never followed those rules. So there was nothing to stop me from facilitating Alice's dream of _Getting Jasper Hale to See the Real Mary Alice Brandon._ This was the sort of fantasy that should have been dropped ten years ago when we left Forks, but Alice was a dreamer. I gave her points for consistency.

We were the first to arrive, something that I could not blame on Alice as I was often the first to come and the first to go. I knew the place would fill up fast, so I told Alice to wait at the bar for our drinks while I claimed a table, and by the time she joined me, Angela Weber and Sandra Cope had also arrived.

I made introductions and asked Angela how the wedding preparations were going, knowing full well that this question would provide an intriguing topic of conversation for the others currently present, if not myself. True to form, they looked at pictures on Angela's phone and debated fabrics that I couldn't have identified had my life depended on it. Fortunately, enough people had arrived by the time that they moved on to cake flavors that I didn't have to worry about lulls in the conversation. I managed to throw in enough remarks or questions here and there to seem sufficiently engaged.

For the most part, I just listened. I sometimes wondered what passersby thought of the conversations they overheard from our department get-togethers at this bar. Debates over whether or not Charlemagne was circumcised and the applicability of literary theory to trial records from the Reign of Terror. Those of us who weren't completely daft threw in some random topics for the non-geeks present, but with the exception of the department secretaries and the random add-ons like Alice, we were all of us introverts pretending for a few hours every couple of weeks to be extroverts, so it was never the social scene d'jour.

When a new round of drinks was wanted and the waitress was nowhere to be seen, I naturally volunteered to go to the bar, thereby winning points for generosity and gaining a temporary reprieve from the festivities. By the time that I returned to the table, however, Jasper had arrived and had taken my seat, next to Alice. This was convenient for Alice, so I made no move to dislodge him, instead leaning up against a post at the opposite end of the table and asking Alistair how his research was going, assured as I was that he would go on for a while about this and not expect more than an occasional nod from me. Alistair did not offer me his seat and I didn't ask for it.

The place had become quite crowded by then and I was never the sort to interest myself in the goings on about me. So I was completely unprepared for the appearance of the newest arrival at my side. Alistair was trying to explain the difference between two popular statistical models for demographic changes due to the Black Plague—_put a bullet in my head_—when I heard a voice saying my name. No, not _my _name. My old nickname. The one I never used anymore. Izzy.

I looked up into forest green eyes and involuntarily stepped back, but the post was behind me so there was nowhere to go.

"How are you?" he asked.

I didn't reply.

He swallowed and looked down in a move that looked suspiciously like discomfort. And the Edward Cullen that I remembered was never uncomfortable. He was always the center of attention in any setting. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to surprise you. Jasper said that you would be here and I just wanted to see you."

I scoffed. I didn't see why _he_ would want to see me. Jasper, indeed. I might not have recognized Edward at all, had it not been for Jasper's recent appearance in the department jogging my memory. Reminding me of things I'd rather not remember at all.

Edward, I could see, had the same green eyes and the same red hair, but these were not unique to him. And his face was the same, I supposed, the jaw square and the nose slightly bent. But did I really remember these details or did I just think that I did? I didn't know. I didn't like looking at him at all.

His appearance gave nothing away. A plain button down gray shirt and black slacks. A common professional. What the fuck was he doing here?

"Bella?" Alistair interrupted.

I glanced down and saw Alistair eyeing me questioningly. Of course, there were rules to social discourse. They had been violated, hadn't they? And quite rudely. Edward Cullen had barged into our discussion. I was not surprised by this show of arrogance on his part. But it would have compounded the violation to chastise Edward for his behavior. It would be much better to pretend that it had never happened. To pretend that Edward hadn't the power to do anything that could touch me.

"Alistair, this is Edward Cullen. Edward, this is Alistair Woods. He teaches Medieval Studies at the university."

Alistair and Edward shook hands. "I'm a friend of Jasper," Edward said, motioning across the table to the individual in question. "I work at CHOP."

_At CHOP? _How long had he been in Seattle?

"A doctor?" Alistair asked, supplying the question that I wanted to ask myself but never would.

Edward nodded, seeming uncomfortable again, though I didn't know why. There wasn't any compelling reason for him to waste his time at a function like this. Didn't doctors have their own happy hours? Were Jasper and he really so inseparable after all of these years?

"I am currently working on a historiography of epidemiology," Alistair replied, blinking furiously. "And have been looking for a contact from the scientific community. My particular area of interest is thirteenth century France. A small town in France, in fact. I wonder if you've ever heard of it. It's called—"

Normally, I didn't mind Alistair, but listening to him drone on while Edward was standing right there wasn't something that I was prepared to endure. "What do you know?" I broke in, shaking my beer bottle. "All out. Do you mind?" I looked at Edward, waiting for him to move out of my way.

"Oh, sorry." He backed up and I slid past him as quickly as possible, hoping to make a smooth exit, which of course meant that I caught my foot on the leg of Alistair's chair and stumbled. Edward caught me, his hands gripping the upper part of my arms, and straightened me up. I mumbled a _thanks_ and escaped to the bar with my dignity by no means intact, but grateful to have gotten away.

One doesn't like to think that childish pranks at least a decade old still have the power to wound. And they don't, not really. I could hardly remember any of that anyhow. But like a Christian who's never read the Old Testament, I still knew the moral of the story.

"Do you prefer the name Bella?" Edward asked behind me.

I froze, and then forced myself to relax and turn towards him. "Bella, yes." Then I thought about _him_ calling me _Bella_ and what that might imply. "No—" Then I imagined him reverting to _Izzy_, hearing that nickname from his lips again. "Whatever. Whatever you want to call me. I don't care," I lied. I didn't want to hear him saying my name, regardless of which one he chose to use. I didn't want to speak to him at all.

"Okay," he seemed uncertain. "Is this alright? Me being here?"

"Why wouldn't it?" I asked. _Yes, Edward, please tell me why the fuck you shouldn't be here. I dare you to admit it._

"I just don't want to upset you."

"Why would you upset me?"

He smiled faintly, relieved. "It's good to see you."

I raised an eyebrow, unable to believe that.

"You look good," he said, giving me an up and down look that I didn't like. "You've changed."

I cocked my head to the side. "I've changed?"

"I nearly didn't recognize you."

Of course. If I looked good, I _must_ have changed.

"But you _did_ recognize me," I pointed out.

"Jasper said you would be here."

I looked back at the table. Jasper and Alice seemed deeply engrossed in their discussion. Jasper hadn't told me anything about bringing Edward, not that I would have expected him to share such information. He had approached me after the previous day's department meeting to say _Hello_ and _Isn't it surprising that we're both working here_ and _Wouldn't it be great to catch up on old times_. To which I'd replied _Hi_ and _I suppose so_ and shrugged. That had been the end of it until later that afternoon, when Jasper had received my department-wide email about the happy hour and had stopped by my office.

"So you must be the social butterfly around here," Jasper had said, leaning up against my doorframe.

"Not really."

I had not returned the smile. His began to fade.

"But, uh, Angela said that you plan all the social functions." There was still a Texas twang to Jasper's speech. I bet he had a tattoo that read _The South will rise again_.

_Rise? _I wondered. _To do what?_

"I do." It was true. I planned the birthday parties, the retirement parties, the engagement parties, the baby showers and the happy hours. The secretaries resented it and the other professors were above it. Besides, it was an easy win. I got credit for caring without doing anything that actually required meaningful human interaction.

"Oh." He had looked confused. I didn't care to clarify the matter.

And now here I was, at said happy hour, facing an old acquaintance—though the term _acquaintance_ didn't seem right. It was too warm. _Old enemy_? No, that suggested intimacy. _Person or persons who, for a time, had made my life a living hell_. That was more like it.

Jasper Hale alone was bad enough, and yet here was Edward Cullen. It was too much. But perhaps Alice was right. We _had_ changed. _I looked good _after all. Ha!

The civilized thing would be to feign indifference, to pretend that old slights had never occurred. Yes, that would be the thing to do.

I forced a smile and stood taller, taking a swig—an actual swig—of my newly procured beer. "So you're a doctor," I said moving to return to the table.

"Do you mind," Edward asked, running a hand through his hair. "Can we just stay here for a minute?" He gestured to the empty stools before us standing at the bar.

"Why?" I couldn't help it. A flicker of suspicion made me wary.

"I want to talk to you, if you don't mind."

I did mind. But what could he do to me? In the public like this? And I didn't want him to think that I was afraid of him.

"Alright." I sat down on one of the stools and began studying the wall of liquor behind the bar.

"How have you been?" Edward asked. The reflection of the glass above the bottles showed him gazing at me.

"Fine." I took another swing.

"When Jasper said that you were working at the university, I couldn't believe it. I mean, what are the chances that he'd get a job at the university you were already working at?"

I hmmed.

"And I've been in Seattle all this time and didn't even know that you were here," he went on.

"Why would you?" I hazarded a glance at him then.

"What?"

"Why would you know that I was here?" I asked.

"No reason, I guess. There's no reason I should know. We didn't have the same friends."

No, we didn't. Shaking my head, I wondered why I'd ever let myself be so cowed by this man. But maybe I wasn't being fair to myself. High school had been such a totalizing experience. Thirty-five hours of pure hell every week.

"What do you teach?" he asked.

"Early Modern through the Enlightenment. Specialty in the Victorian."

"Oh. I don't know anything about that."

I hardly expected otherwise. I smiled wanly.

There was a beat of silence. How much was I expected to contribute to this conversation? I didn't think that the social rules applied. I didn't work with him and I didn't care if I ever saw him again.

"Do you think we could get coffee some time?" Edward inquired suddenly.

"What?"

"Coffee?"

I gaped at him for a moment. "Why would _you_ want to have coffee with _me_?" This was above and beyond. I wasn't Alice, so lacking in self-esteem that I required validation from old nemeses.

"There's something I need to talk about with you."

"What could we possibly have to say to one another?"

"It's important."

I waved a hand. "So talk."

Edward glanced around. "It's too loud here. I'd rather we spoke somewhere less—less crowded."

"And you suggest a coffee shop in Seattle?" I laughed.

"You could come to my condo."

I choked on my beer. After several embarrassing seconds trying to clear my throat as Edward motioned to pound on my back only for me to knock his hand away, I asked him again: "Why?"

"Because you're the only one who knows that I'm not a murderer."

**AN: I wonder what Edward did to Bella to make her so wary…**

**Question: Does the style of exposition match up with the dialogue, or is there too much of a disconnect? This is a standing question for every chapter.**

**Recommendation: My goal is to recommend old stories that you may never have heard of. I'm going by "number of reviews" to determine how well they are known, and since I'm out of the gossip loop, I may just end up recommending reposts that everyone's already heard of. Oh well.**

**First recommendation: Bookends by Bella's Executioner **

**AH/AU Edward and Bella are two lost souls in a sea of lost souls… but love conquers all. Right? Rated M for harsh language/Lemons/Slash/mature content/Drug Use. The story spans the lives of these characters**


	3. Chapter 3

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 2

'_The strangeness of the figure, and its being so close akin to his own nature, attracted him.' – Bram Stoker_

BPOV

I opened the envelope and scanned the letter, suspecting already the sort of thing that I would read:

'_The strangeness of the figure, and its being so close akin to his own nature, attracted him.'_

I didn't recognize the quote, though it was familiar. By the time that I made it to my office and clicked on my computer, I was sure that it was James Malcolm Rymer.

I was, of course, incorrect. Bram Stoker, _The Lair of the White Wyrm_.

The dried flower included inside the envelope was completely foreign to me. Perfectly white with a yellow center. I knew enough to conclude that it wasn't a rose, but that was the limit of my horticultural expertise.

I had received at least twenty letters just like this over the last two years. All of them delivered to the university, forwarded by the college press who'd published my dissertation in book form. The envelopes varied, but inside I always found a single dried flower and a sheet of paper containing a handwritten quote from a seemingly random piece of Gothic literature. Neither the flowers nor the quotes were ever repeated.

As the daughter of a police chief, I should perhaps have been more concerned. But as the daughter of a police chief, I also knew that there was nothing the police could do. None of the letters contained any sort of threat, per se, and even if they had been intended as a threat, couched in the form of quotations, they could hardly be taken seriously.

I doubted my father would take such a laissez-faire view of the matter. I had never mentioned the letters them to him.

As much as I didn't want to admit it, I probably relished the receipt of these missives a bit more than was appropriate. More than once, I had felt a rush of exhilaration at the notion that I might have a secret admirer. The quotations were probably not the sort to quicken the excitement of many other women, but they were just the sort to appeal to me. Indeed, the strangeness of the language, and its being so akin to my own nature, attracted me.

This was sheer folly. I knew better than to let my imagination run rampant. While I was here imagining Lawrence Olivier as Heathcliff, penning his missives to me with a quill pen and a bottle of black ink, the letters were probably the work of a soccer mom putting herself through community college, who'd come across my book in an introductory English class, and had been moved to imagine herself taking up a friendship via letter—such a romantically (in the platonic sense) old-fashioned form of communication—with a person she'd never met. I wondered if it had even occurred to her that, since I too was a woman, her communications might be considered outré by more plebian minds. Or was that the point? One of those close female friendships of yesteryear to which modern feminists like to affix lesbian labels, not realizing that by so doing they themselves violate a more Freudian version of the Bechdel test.

In any case, this friendship was entirely doomed, for there was no return address and therefore, no way for me to respond. It had occurred to me more than once that I was meant to decode the meaning of the flowers and decipher some hidden message behind the quotations, and thereby learn how to locate my secret correspondent. The small thrill I felt at the suggestion of a mystery always faded as I remembered the mountain of student essays that I had to grade and the outlines waiting to be filled in for lectures and the notes waiting to be collated for my research.

So I added the latest missive to my collection on a far shelf of the bookcase in my office just as a student walked in the door, wanting help with an assignment and asking me why there was so much reading in my class and whether or not it was fair to require modern students to parse out such antiquated language when evolution had clearly decided that the stilted manner of the discourse in question was obsolete. I expressed my sympathies to the young woman, who went by the charming name of Bree and it wasn't even a nickname, confided that I didn't understand any of the abbreviations from today's tweeting or the symbols for emotions that went into texts, but that I did read French, German, Latin, Spanish and Italian, so I didn't think it was too much to ask that students make their way through eighteenth century English.

I had one more student drop by for office hours before I had to leave for the dreaded _coffee_ _with Edward_. It had been exactly one week since he had extended his invitation. I'd fled the bar almost immediately after his request, unable to go on obeying the social niceties with Jasper Fucking Hale's hand on Alice's knee under the table where he thought no one could see it, and Edward Fucking Cullen looking all morose and full of woe when he'd no right to ask for pity from anyone, let alone me. As if anyone really thought he was a murderer. I didn't believe it. _I_ was the one who'd come away from that debacle with the taint of suspicion. _I _was the one they all looked at askance.

I usually left the departmental happy hours relatively early in the evening, so no one raised an eyebrow. It was enough that I went out of my way to arrange these events. I didn't need to close the place down. So I told Alice that she would have to take a taxi, and didn't feel at all guilty for doing so. Besides, she got herself home just fine. She sent me a text at two o'clock the following morning telling me that she was in her apartment and going to bed. I was already asleep, and didn't see the text until I woke up three and a half hours later, but that wasn't the point. The sending and receiving of texts to confirm the safety of fellow females was, I had learned, an important rule of modern etiquette.

The rest of the week passed uneventfully. Seth called asking if I would be willing to prepare one or two appetizers for his gallery showing and I agreed. He continued calling to go over the menu until I stopped answering. He reverted to texts, which I could decipher if abbreviations and symbols were avoided. I sent him a reply via text saying that I would do a tasting menu for him on Sunday but I wasn't going to go shopping until Saturday afternoon, so I was just going to buy ingredients for whatever his last text at that time read, and I wasn't going to talk to him until he came to townhouse on Sunday. This reduced the number of texts. Slightly.

I managed to avoid Jasper Hale for most of the week. He caught me in the copy room on Wednesday, unfortunately, and kept me there for a full five minutes, telling me how much fun he'd had at the happy hour and thanks for inviting him and it had been so nice to catch up with Alice.

_What the fuck did they have to catch up on?_ I wondered.

I imagined a round of _show me yours and I'll show you mine_: Alice saying, _And here's the number of times I slept with random guys to make up for the numerous occasions on which you suggested that my unattractiveness to the opposite sex implied that I was a lesbian, not that there's anything wrong with being a lesbian, unless of course you aren't one and the implication is intended to manifest your deficiencies and complete inadequacy as a human being._ And Jasper: _Remember all of those times I made fun of the outfits you wore to school because you couldn't afford anything better? Wasn't that funny? I have grown as a person though because when I was in grad school I too shopped at thrift shop now and then because they really have the best hipster paraphernalia around._

I told Jasper that I was happy that he was fitting in so well and to make sure that the head secretary had his birthday because we always liked to do something special.

Asshole.

Then he started talking about Alice and I said that I had to go.

It was like a _Hallmark_ movie: High school bullies and their victims reunited. I suppose the scriptwriter expected us to show how much we'd all _grown_ as people and we'd become the best of friends. Edward and Jasper were no doubt filled with remorse for their past crimes (there is no concern for credibility in the land of _Hallmark_) and so desperate for friendship (they'd learned their lesson darn it!) that they were lowering their standards so far as to seek out the two lowest creatures on the old high school social scale. Perhaps a Ghost from Christmas Past had counseled them to make amends. Of course, losers have no standards so Alice and I would be all too willing to accept the overtures of two reformed assholes. I wonder if the two of us were still losers or if we had somehow _redeemed_ ourselves in the intervening decade and thus were at last _good enough_ for the likes of Mr. Hale and Mr. Cullen.

_Yeah, fuck that._

But I kept my mouth shut about what I really thought, because it was clear that Alice was fairly taken with Jasper. She said that they had exchanged numbers and had spoken several times since. He was _so dreamy_ and exactly the same, she said.

The same? I hardly thought that could be true if she actually enjoyed herself with him, but I deemed it impertinent to point this out and said nothing instead.

And what did this quality of _sameness _entail anyhow? Alice's whole justification for renewed association was dependent on change. The notion that none of us were the same creatures who had attended school together. But there was also, it seemed, the lingering remnants of some kindred spiritedness, forged in the shared experiences of youth, without which mutual interests would not exist. But then again, these experiences weren't really _shared_, were they?

As for Edward Cullen, I had agreed to meet him for coffee, to prove to myself how much I had grown as a person, but not at his condo. That would have been too much. We were meeting up back at the bar. It was only two o'clock in the afternoon, rather early for drinking but also early enough that the bar would be nearly deserted.

I was anxious. I had to admit that. But my anxiousness just pissed me off. What did I have to be worried about? So what if he _did_ try something? I'd just get up and walk away. Words couldn't really hurt me. I'd long ago perfected my mask. A complete disconnect between myself and the world. Bombs could drop and no would see me flinch, or so I liked to tell myself. Besides, Edward had certainly never laid a hand on me, even back then. His attacks were always verbal in nature. And the notion that he could revert to his old behavior now just seemed so juvenile. _Hell, it'd been juvenile in high school!_

He was waiting when I arrived, and stood up as I approached the table, smiling stupidly.

"You came," he said, stating the obvious. "I was afraid that you wouldn't."

I shrugged. I registered that this gesture was becoming fairly standard where Jasper Hale and Edward Cullen were concerned.

Edward had already ordered us coffees. They arrived just as I was sitting down. "Why did you want to meet?" I asked Edward, wanting to jump straight to the point.

He cleared his throat, seeming anxious. This Edward Cullen was a stranger to me. He'd always been so sure of himself. That cocky arrogance. How I'd hated it. "I wanted to talk to you about what happened."

There could be only one thing he meant. "Why?"

Edward fiddled with his spoon. "Doesn't it bother you? That it's still unresolved?"

I shrugged again, then recognized the beginnings of an unsavory new habit and stiffened. "It doesn't have anything to do with me."

"How can you say that?" The sound of dismay in Edward's voice was really off-putting, almost accusatory. As if I could be held responsible for anything that happened.

"I'm not the police." I waved a hand. "What was I supposed to do?"

"But doesn't it keep you up at night sometimes? Doesn't it—" his tone grew harsh. "A girl died."

"She wasn't my friend."

"Are you serious?"

"Of course."

He looked at me disbelievingly. "I just never thought you would be like this. You of all people. You didn't have to do what you did for me."

"Yes I did."

"No, you didn't. You could have let me rot in jail."

"But I knew that you were innocent."

"And you hated me. Isn't that what you told the police? That's why they believed you in the end. I know. I have a friend now in the Port Angeles police force. He looked into the files for me. I know what you told them. They didn't believe you at first. They thought you were lying because—" He cut off, as if he was embarrassed.

I supplied the missing words. "That I was in love with you, so I lied." I caught a glimpse of my face in the window of the bar and noted that the expression on my face registered no change as the words fell out of my lips. Words that ought to have meant something but meant just the opposite. My body didn't tremble. I'd expected something—some physical counterpart to the horror of the notion that I'd just suggested. That I could have felt anything but abject hatred for Edward Cullen. I felt nothing.

"Yeah. Something like that," he mumbled. Fucking Neanderthal.

"Which couldn't have been further from the truth." Because I was dead inside. And I hated him.

_Hate?_

The word wasn't strong enough.

He said, "I wanted to thank you. I tried that time in the diner."

I held up a hand, not wanting to talk about that time. It had happened right after he was released, an event which inconveniently coincided with the arrival of my mother, Renee, who had stormed into town, claiming that she wanted to make amends but really just waiting to accuse me of lying. _I had lied about her new husband, Phil_, or so she claimed, _so why not lie about Edward Cullen? Was I hoping to get into his bed too? _

"Little slut." That's what she'd called me.

But she hadn't gotten to that part yet, when Edward came up to us in the diner, with my mother gaping at him, a French fry hanging out of her mouth and her make-up smeared. Because God forbid she not show up in my town looking like shit and falling out of clothes that were two-sizes too small.

I didn't let Edward say whatever it was he'd wanted to say to me that day, snapping at him to just "Keep on walking." His friend—what was his name? James, that was it—James had been standing behind Edward in the diner. He'd burst out laughing at my words.

Yet Edward had turned and left, thank God, and I'd felt relieved, sick that he had seen my mother like that, but nonetheless relieved, a feeling that lasted only a beat before my mother started in with the accusations. _Who was that?_ she asked. _Was that Edward Cullen? Why did you lie?_

I didn't want to think about that now. I sipped my coffee and forced my muscles—coiled in the desire to flee—to relax, pushing the memory of my mother's words away. There was no reason to be upset. I had told the truth. Both times.

In any case, I needed to remind Edward just why the police were so suspicious of my motives. He was too grateful for my comfort. "They thought that I took too long. They didn't understand why I didn't come forward right away."

"Why didn't you?"

The question took me aback. Wasn't it obvious? "I was in Florida when everything happened. Visiting my mother. I flew out of Seattle the morning after—the morning after _it_ happened and I didn't know anything about it until I got back. I came home early actually."

"Oh. I guess it was lucky for me that you came home early then."

"Yeah, lucky for you." I'd come home early from Florida thanks to a frantic call to my father, Charlie, in the middle of the night from a pay-phone at the airport, where I'd gone to call him, to beg him to let me come home, not telling him precisely what Phil had done—I couldn't—but saying enough that Charlie arranged for me to fly home immediately. If he hadn't agreed, I don't know what I would have done. Fortunately, I was eighteen, so it was up to me whether or not to see Renee after that. As it so happened, I did see her, just once, that time in the diner back in Forks, where we interrupted by Edward and his friend James. "When I came home," I explained, "I heard what happened. I remembered that I'd seen you in the forest that day when I was hiking. I knew you weren't in Port Angeles. I knew you couldn't have done—_it_."

"Still, you didn't have to come forward."

"Yes I did."

"No you didn't."

"You don't know me."

"I guess I don't."

And cue awkward pause. Why the fuck was I here? "So," I said, "you wanted to thank me, I guess, because I wouldn't let you back then. No _thank you_ was ever necessary. I didn't do it for you. I did it because it was the truth. But you're welcome anyway." I hoped that would be the end of it.

"It's not just that, though yeah, I wanted to say thank you, which I haven't actually said, _thank you_, I mean. So thank you." Did Edward always struggle to express himself like this? Or was this a new development? The slurs he'd thrown at me in high school had certainly been precise and to the point. Maybe that was it—he didn't know how to talk to me while pretending to be nice.

I blinked. "You're welcome," I said again.

"The real reason I wanted to see you, well the other reason, besides saying thank you, was because of what I said at the happy hour. You're the only person who really believes that I'm innocent."

"I'm sure that's not true."

Edward shook his head ruefully. "Well, you're the only one who _knows_. They all say that they all _believe_ that I'm innocent, but you _know _it."

This was ridiculous. "They don't believe me?"

"It's not just you. There was a lie detector test."

"And?"

"I didn't pass."

I gaped at him. "What do you mean, _you didn't pass_? You were in the woods, between Forks and La Push. You couldn't possibly have made it to Port Angeles and back, no matter how fast you drove. You didn't kill her." I used the words that time, not avoiding them. He hadn't _killed _her. This politeness—my effort to avoid being explicit—was in accordance with the rules of etiquette. No one likes to say things so harshly. But that wasn't me. I didn't shy away from the truth. Words were just sounds strung together. If I avoided them, it was only because I was following the rules.

"I didn't _fail fail_. It was just inconclusive. And I didn't know that you saw me that day. I didn't know that you were in the woods, too. For all I knew, I didn't have an alibi. There was just so much going on. Do you realize how much evidence they had against me? And after everything with my parents. I was just so upset. I thought if I took the test then it would clear me. I guess, I was just too anxious. God," he was running his hands through his hair again. "Do you know what they did to Tanya?"

I knew. Someone had tied her down and drained her blood. She had died of exsanguination. _Exsanguination._ Such an antiquated term. Not one that an eighteen year old living in America should know today.

"Why didn't your lawyer or your parents stop you from taking the test?" I asked, trying to be logical. It probably didn't matter. I _knew_ that he was innocent. But it was rather strange, wasn't it, that he would agree to take a lie detector test that he was going to fail?

"I wasn't listening to them. I was just so pissed. And I was eighteen."

"Pissed? Why were you pissed?" I was almost certain that it was just his ego. He couldn't believe that they really suspected him. What a conceited prick.

"I was fighting with my parents even before it happened. That' s why I was in the woods that day."

"What were you fighting about? What could have possibly been so important that it couldn't have been set aside when Tanya was murdered?"

"In retrospect, it was fucking stupid. I was an idiot. But I couldn't deal with them trying to control my life anymore. Almost everything that I did, I did because of them. I wanted to run cross-country but they made me play football. I wanted to take one class, they made me take another. I wanted to take a year off after high school and travel, but they wanted me to go directly to college. My parents even pushed me into dating Tanya. The day of her murder was the last straw. I wanted to major in music. My parents wanted me pre-med."

_Are you fucking kidding me_? "Why didn't you just lie to them? Your parents can't access your college records even if they're footing the bill."

"My father had friends in the science department. He would have known."

"This isn't _Dead Poets' Society._ How important could it really have been?"

"I was _good. _I could have gotten into Juliard."

Holy crap. _Juliard?_

Whatever. I didn't care. "So what?" I asked. "The lie detector test was inconclusive. But you and I know that you weren't guilty."

Edward laughed. It wasn't a real laugh. A sudden maniacal sound. I looked around the bar, happy that it was practically empty and that there weren't many people there to witness this display. "You and I. You and I know. And everyone else thinks I got you to lie for me."

"Then they don't know either of us very well, do they? I'd _never_ lie for you."

"You don't think I told them that?" He was glaring at me. Such a surplus of emotion. I shifted uncomfortably. "Can you imagine what it was like telling _my mother_ just how I knew for a fact that you of all people would never lie for me? How much you hated me? How I knew that you couldn't possibly have anything but contempt for me?"

Was he serious? Was this conversation really happening? Fuck propriety. "Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?" I asked, unwilling to keep the sneer from my tone. "You had to tell mommy dearest what a monster her beloved son was and I'm supposed to pity you. Go fuck yourself."

"I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me," he snapped back.

"Then what the hell do you want from me?"

"I want you to help me find Tanya's killer."

**AN: REVIEWERS RECEIVE AN OUTTAKE FROM MR. BERTY, HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, A DECADE BEFORE THE ABOVE CHAPTER.**

**Does Edward seem like a real person?**

**Author Rec: The Blessing Ring by QuantumFizzx - After missing out on love, Bella goes thru the motions in life. Forces begin to compel her to go after the only thing she had ever truly wanted... even when that dream is farther out of reach than ever before. AH B/E**


	4. Chapter 4

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 3

'_There is salvation for the repentant man, but none for me!' – George W. M. Reynolds_

BPOV

_Last time on _Gothic,_ one Edward Cullen had just requested Ms. Swan's assistance in the search for the killer of Mr. Cullen's former girlfriend. We wait, on pins and needles, for our heroine's response._

I gaped at Edward. I could hardly believe that he meant it. "You want me to help you find Tanya's killer?" I asked stupidly, even though I had heard him clearly enough.

"Why not?" he demanded.

"It's impossible."

"If anyone can solve her murder, it should be us."

I scoffed. "Do I look like I'm in the FBI?"

"The FBI did try. And they failed."

"My point exactly," I said, though I hadn't known that the FBI had actually been involved. That must have been after my part was over. I'd never talked to an agent.

"They didn't have our perspective," Edward insisted.

"That's right. They were just well-trained agents with CSI stuff."

"CSI _stuff_?"

"Yeah." Dumbass.

"Well, all that CSI _stuff_ led them directly to me. So it didn't them any good, did it?"

I shook my head. "They would have figured it out eventually."

It was Edward's turn to scoff. "Right. They had _my_ car. _My_ hair at the crime scene. They even had an eyewitness who said she saw me pick Tanya up in Port Angeles. There was blood in my car. Tanya's blood. How did that get there?"

"You gave Tanya a ride to school every day for months. You dated. It wasn't that much blood. She could have cut her hand and touched the side of the passenger seat. Besides, your Volvo was sitting in the driveway of your house in Forks when someone picked her up in Seattle. It wasn't your car."

"And my hair at the crime scene?"

"It could have been on her jacket. The two of you had been all over each other for the last few weeks."

"They _saw_ me in Port Angeles."

I paused. "They saw someone who happened to look like you and had a car like yours. Or someone set you up."

"What kind of a serial killer sets up an eighteen year old?"

"Technically, it wasn't a serial unless there was another—"

"Bella—"

I pursed my lips at his use of that name.

He went on. "Whoever it was, they knew me. They knew Tanya. And they hated both of us."

"Case solved. It was me."

"That's not funny."

"I wasn't trying to be."

Edward gazed at me. "They could have killed any girl that day. It could have been you."

"I'm not interesting enough to serial kill."

"That's not a verb. And still not funny."

"When you've watched as many horror movies as I have, 'serial kill' becomes a verb," I explained. "Are you under the impression that I care what you think of me? I'm not your friend. I wasn't Tanya's friend. Girls get killed all the time. Why the fuck should I care?"

"Because you came forward and told the police that I couldn't have picked up Tanya in Port Angeles and killed her that day because I was sitting in a meadow sixty miles away."

Son of a—

He was right.

I paused, thinking about it. Girls did get killed all the time, and if I had a chance to do something about it and didn't, then I would have to bear the responsibility for that. Besides, it still rankled—the accusation that I had lied for Edward Cullen still followed me around. At one point, public disfavor was so strong that my father had almost lost his place on the Forks police force.

Yet there was still a minor point that required clarification. "I don't see how you think that we can solve a case that has everyone else baffled," I said.

"Because we're the only ones who know not to waste time looking at me as a suspect."

I drank the rest of my coffee and thought some more.

He started to plead his case again, "Look—"

"I'll do it," I cut him off.

Edward stared at me for a moment. "You will?"

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"There's nothing to thank me for. I don't expect to be helpful."

"I'm sure you will be."

I chose not to comment on that.

He cleared his throat. "So I, uh, I have all my notes and things back at my condo."

"That's why you wanted to meet there for coffee?"

Edward nodded.

"What do you mean? Notes?"

"All of the articles and some police files."

I knew enough to know that sounded suspicious. "The police released all of those files to someone they suspected in an unsolved case?"

"My friend on the Port Angeles police force—I saved his daughter's life after she was hit by a car. That's how we met."

"Was the FBI really involved?"

"Tanya's uncle was a judge. He called in a favor."

If only all dead teenage girls had uncles with favors to call in.

Something occurred to me. "Why do you care this much? I don't buy this explanation that you're plagued by suspicion. You obviously have a successful career."

"You don't know anything about me," he said, parroting my words from earlier. I supposed it was true enough.

"You do seem different," I said, and then felt awkward. Why had I said that?

"What do you mean?"

"Not yourself," I clarified, meaning that he was speaking to me like I was an actual human being. That he wasn't the many tentacled Cthulu beast of my memories.

"That's not helpful."

"See? Already I'm falling down on the job." Perhaps I could convince him to call this project off after all.

"You seem different, too."

There it was again. "I am exactly the same," I declared.

"No, you're not."

What a dick. "Whatever." My repeated use of such a term annoyed me. It was juvenile.

"I just mean that you've done very well for yourself."

What the fuck did that mean? I simply cocked an eyebrow.

"You got your Ph.D. You're a doctor," Edward explained.

"So are you."

"And Jasper says that you're very well liked at the university."

Just what was he getting at? "Well it's not Juliard. They're not very discerning."

"I'm sure it's very prestigious."

"They took Jasper." Really, that was enough to make one question everything.

"Jasper's dissertation was nominated for a national award," Edward told me, as if this was proof of Jasper's excellence.

"Hmph." The nominating committee was probably dominated by southerners.

"Look, I'm just trying to find some common ground with you," Edward argued.

"Why bother?"

"Shouldn't we try to get along?" he asked.

"Get along?" Was he insane?

"Don't you think it would help?"

His suggestion wasn't illogical, but I didn't care to make him think that I agreed. I held my tongue.

Edward changed the topic. "So I have to work tonight, but whenever you're free, and I'm off, you can come around, I'll show you what I've got."

I nodded.

"In the meantime," he looked at his wristwatch.

"Yeah, I've got to go," I lied.

"You do?" he seemed relieved.

"Mmm hmm." I reached for my wallet.

"It's on me," he stopped me.

"Are you sure?"

"It's just coffee."

I supposed that he was right, but I still didn't like the idea of owing Edward for anything. "So when are you off again?" I asked.

"This time tomorrow, but I'm going to be exhausted. What about Saturday?"

I nodded.

"What time?" he asked.

"Whenever." I probably should have specified a time. He wasn't a friend. I didn't care if he wasn't available. In fact, it would be better for me if he wasn't available and this whole business simply went away.

"Noon."

"Fine." What a fucking inane conversation.

We stared at each other blankly for a minute.

"Can I get your address?" I asked, resenting the need for my request.

"Oh yeah," he gave me his address. "And you should probably have my cell, too." He gave that to me as well. I considered not giving him my cell in return, but that would be ridiculous. I didn't give him my address. That would have been overkill.

"Saturday then," I confirmed, standing up.

"Saturday," he replied.

And I left.

Jesus fucking Christ.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

That night was the first time I dreamt of Edward Cullen. The setting was our old stomping grounds, Forks High, of course, the vicious fancy of sleep turning the unhappy images that I still recalled but dimly into a Dantesque nightmare. Dream logic had me wandering endless corridors lined with lockers and cringing away from the too well lit cafeteria—no shade left in which to hide—to the chant of grotesque serenades from the rabble crowding around, the creatures who ought to have been my peers but were instead my tormentors, demonic in my memory perhaps but even worse in my dreams, grimaces distorted into ghoulish masks. How comical the irrational—and yet how visceral the old fear once called back up from where it lay dormant so long. A carnival of mockery for which one has only herself to blame, for it ought not to matter_. It ought not to matter. It ought not to matter_. All of it too much like a staged production at the _Grand Guignol_, the florescent lights shining down on me as I lay on the lab table in my biology classroom, pinned and helpless as Jasper Hale and James What's-his-name and a faceless horde of others jeered at me while the modern day leech, physician-in-training, Edward Cullen, took his time going about his examination of my person. Something that had never actually happened but which _felt_ as if it _must_ have happened, or at least something of the like—something _physical_, something more than just their words—for how else was I to justify the sensations of despair that surrounded all of my memories of high school? Surely words alone could not have inflicted so much pain. Nevertheless, humiliation, terror and disgust were now competing for dominance in the aftermath of this macabre nightmare, a nightmare that was made all the worse by its ability to incapacitate me beyond all reason, because of course it _shouldn't_ matter, and yet it did.

The images of the dream faded quickly after I woke up, leaving an irrational but nonetheless distinct sense of dread in their wake. Like my actual memories from the years in question—the _Roiling Abyss_—the facts themselves were vague but the emotions were vivid. A different sort of torture from those first few years of undergrad—the _Mountains of Madness_—but no less fondly recalled. I'd no desire to remember any of that. Safety lay in forgetting. Lock the corpse in the dungeon and throw away the key.

Thus, I couldn't help but look upon the reappearance of JFH and EFC—Jasper Fucking Hale and Edward Fucking Cullen—with a sense of foreboding. I didn't blame them though. Not completely. How could I? There was a natural order to society. Unless one is living in some dystopian teenage novel, social distinctions will emerge.

It only made sense that I would fall to the bottom of the pecking order.

All that was done and we weren't in high school anymore. But what did that mean? We weren't friends, nor would we ever be. Alice was only living out some desperate revenge fantasy in which JFH would be forced to apologize for all the wrongs he had ever done her. If she had really changed as much as she claimed she had, of if she had really gotten over all of it, she wouldn't need his apology. I certainly didn't want it. Even if I got it—

If JFH or EFC ever tried to apologize to me, I would claw their eyes out.

I didn't, to be entirely honest, quite remember the details of all of their crimes. But I remembered the dread that their actions had engendered. It had come alive again with my dream and had filled me with a lingering nausea that morning as I showered and dressed. I stared at the oatmeal that I didn't want to eat, and felt myself wishing that I would never again have to see either one of them.

There was no way to avoid JFH. But he was a co-worker and there were rules governing that relationship. So long as he obeyed the rules of civilized conduct—_Sorry, what's that? Are you confused because my mouth is saying 'thank you for holding the door' while my face is saying 'I want to punch you in the throat'? I guess it's just my pesky struggle with your complete hypocrisy. If you really were the sort of gentleman that you go around pretending to be, you'd also pretend not to notice the discrepancy._—then we would be just fine. And if he didn't follow the rules, I would pull rank. I had been at that university longer than him. The other professors were, for the most part, introverted past-geeks like me. They wouldn't side with him. And the admin appreciated my insistence that they be treated as more than subhuman bottom-dwellers. I was the big man on campus now.

Well, sort of.

As for EFC, I would not let my dislike of him interfere with the resolution of this project. That was exactly how I would treat the investigation of Tanya's murder—as a project. I didn't expect us to be successful, but I didn't plan to put any more effort into it than what I already put into arranging happy hours or baking birthday cakes. I would do just enough to fulfill the social obligation of a person touched by tragedy.

Was that what I was? A person touched by tragedy? Tanya's death was a tragedy. I wasn't so monstrous that I couldn't recognize that. But was I really the disinterested star of a Lifetime movie? No. I didn't care enough about Tanya for that. I was the bitch in the first act who retreated to the background while the actual plot played out. I was just playing my role, lest it get around that I had been asked to help and had turned up my nose.

Not that there was really anyone for such a story to get around to. Who would care? Alice? Ha! Not unless she thought that my participation in the project would somehow aid her in her quest to get revenge on JFH, a quest that involved either destroying him or making him fall in love with her, possibly both. I wasn't clear on all of the details.

In any case, I would still play my role in this little mystery. I would do it for the _story. _I certainly didn't care what Edward Fucking Cullen thought of me.

And with this resolution in place, I opened the front door to leave, and stumbled back in horror at the sight of the dead animal on my doorstep.

**AN: Rec: Hit by Destiny. I know, I know. It hardly qualifies as a diamond in the rough because it has so many reviews. But it has the best high school torture scenes that I know of.**


	5. Chapter 5

**Meyer owns all.**

**Muchas gracias to NewTwilightFan for the rec on ADF!**

**Sorry I didn't get a chance to respond to reviews! I do appreciate them and will respond ASAP!**

Chapter 4

'_Sensuous hopes trampled upon; visionary joys despised. There is no future gladness. Destiny works. What are we more than a handful of faded leaves tossed by the early winter wind?' – R. Murray Gilchrist_

BPOV

I lived on a quiet street, further from campus than others in the faculty liked but that was the point. I preferred seclusion to convenience.

So there was no one there to see me as I used a broom to push the hideous dead thing—a squirrel?—off of my front step and to the curb. Then I put the broom in the outdoor garbage bin.

I would bury _it_ when I got home that night. _Or should I put it in the garbage? _I didn't know. Just throwing it in the garbage seemed too horrible, though I wasn't sure that I could stomach burying it. But that was cowardice, wasn't it? The smell was grotesque—I would put Vix vapor rub under my nose to block the scent. I had a shovel. I could do it.

I would just keep my eyes closed while I used the broom to push the thing into the hole. Then I would throw away the broom again.

I had no idea how _it_ had managed to get up on my step. The body looked as if it had been run over. Almost perfectly flat. Just the tail fluttering awfully in the wind.

Fortunately, it was Seattle and thus it would almost certainly rain soon. Rain would help wash away the stench.

In the meantime, I didn't think that I would be able to bear putting my foot down on the pavement where _it _had lain.

Trying to be more rational about the matter, I drove to work and decided that its appearance was a prank. The body couldn't possibly have gotten there by itself. Some bratty neighbor kid.

But why? I had amicable relations with all of my neighbors. Which is to say that I greeted them as I passed, had no loud parties, saw to it that the snow on my sidewalk was always shoveled and that my lawn was always mowed, and didn't put the garbage out too early. I firmly believed that the preservation of harmonious living arrangements was contingent upon the absence of intimate knowledge of one's neighbors. _Don't shit where you eat_, et cetera.

Besides, I didn't think that there were any teenagers living in the immediate vicinity. Pre-teens only. Perhaps I ought to stop and chat with one or two of my neighbors after all. Find out if any of them had been subjected to the same treatment—_ugh!_

A night filled with unhappy school day memories, followed by the discovery of such a charming present on my doorstep, hardly left me in the best of spirits. There was, however, a familiarity to such a mood that was almost reassuring. There is a point in life where depression is more comfortable than happiness. At least then you know that things can't get worse.

Nevertheless, I couldn't quite bring myself to eat the massive salad that I'd brought for lunch. Rather than let it go to waste, I put it out in the faculty lounge for anyone who wanted it.

"What's the occasion?" Angela asked. "Another birthday?"

In fact, my own birthday had just passed. The best perk of overseeing such celebrations in the department was ensuring that my own birthday passed without anyone's knowledge. A phone call to my father and a quiet dinner with a few friends had more than sufficed.

I shook my head. "A leafy show of mourning for the death of grammar as a subject in the American school system."

"Can't be that bad darlin', can it?" Jasper drawled. I hadn't realized that he was there.

I smiled sweetly at him and batted my eyelashes, feigning a Scarlet O'Hara accent. "With naught but the scent of decay and rotting flesh dogging me, the cursed nature of existence is now a gross mockery of what once passed for joy in my life, don't you know?"

He blinked. "Oh, sorry."

"I found a dead animal on my doorstep this morning," I explained for Angela's benefit.

She was already filling a plate with salad. "Don't care. This looks yummy and I never turn down free food."

Jasper eyed Angela dubiously, then followed suit. I considered taking the bowl of salad away before he could get any, but that would have been too obvious, so I just made a cup of tea.

"Hey, Bella," he started. _Did I tell him he could call me Bella?_ No. "Did Alice tell you that we wanted to meet up some time next week?"

"What?" I almost dropped the tin of tea in surprise.

"Yeah, Alice thought it would be fun to go to a bar next week and hang out."

There must have been some mistake. "I do not—hang out." Surely Alice would never have volunteered me for such a thing.

Angela laughed.

"Shut up," I hissed. Attempting to stem the burst of anxiety, I requested clarification. "What is the occasion?"

"Just getting to know each other better."

"I already know Alice very well."

Jasper nodded. "I thought it would be good just to get to know you better myself."

"Why?"

"Well—because we're working together. And because of Alice."

"Because of Alice?"

Jasper nodded again.

I studied him for a moment, then looked at Angela. "Angela, you'll join us of course." It was rude of him to have this conversation in front of her without extending an invitation himself. This was a well-known rule of social interaction.

She smirked and shook her head. "Can't. I'm busy all next week."

"All next week? How is that possible?"

"Wedding. We're checking out venues."

I looked back at Jasper. "I'll see if Seth or Jane and the others are free."

He straightened his spine. "Well the thing is that we kind of just wanted it to be the three of us."

"The three of us?"

"Yep."

"Like a threesome?" I was crossing serious lines by having this conversation at work, but this was becoming too much. A happy hour now and then was tolerable. But coffee and dinner and apartment visits?! And I was pretty sure that the "darlin'" Jasper had thrown at me at the beginning of this conversation constituted sexual harassment.

Jasper started choking while Angela cackled.

"I'm not interested," I said. "And I don't believe that Alice suggested to you that I was and—"

"Nnn," Jasper mumbled, holding a hand up. He coughed some more and cleared his throat. "Just the three of us getting to know each other as friends."

"Does Alice know that you want to be just friends with her?"

"No," he looked confused. "That is—"

"Have Alice tell me when," I told him, already more than a little bored with this tete-a-tete.

He nodded yet again. _Fucking puppy should cut his goddamn hair_, I thought. He looked like a golden retriever.

I checked the hallway when I left the lounge, relieved not to see anyone who might have overheard me sexually harassing the puppy.

I made it all of the way to my office before it occurred to me that Alice might object to my treatment of her _Jasper, sigh_. I decided that I didn't give a shit.

This was a lie.

By some small mercy, the dead animal was gone when I got home. I shuddered, imagining a dog carrying the corpse away for dinner.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I dreamt of Edward Cullen again. This time, we were dissecting squirrels on the lab table that we'd been forced to share in junior year biology. Dream-Cullen kept snatching up squirrel parts—kidneys, flaps of skin—and tossing them at my face, urging me to take a taste.

It would have been almost laughable, a scene from vaudeville, were it not for the malice in my lab partner's face and voice, and the sense of utter dread that both invoked in me. I was certain that I would not leave that room unscathed, Dream-Cullen's wrath taken out on me in ways that defied my dream-imagination, my eyes on the door and knowing full well that if I tried to make a run for it that I would not make it more than a foot. Terror of what would happen when he caught me kept me rooted in place as he completed his dissection, flinging the items that he removed from the squirrel in my direction. I could only cringe as the squirrel's eye and then its tongue struck my cheek, a piece of brain landing in my hair.

Waking up with the imagined scent of rancid flesh still stinging my nostrils, I curled into a fetal position and pulled the covers over my head, trying to put the images from my dream out of my head.

I knew, of course, the lurid psychoanalytical explanations for the nature of my dream. It was entirely explicable and more than a little boring, a realization that only marginally helped dispel the lingering sense of revulsion that it continued to summon. I had decided to become a vegetarian at the age of fourteen because it wasn't enough that I was already a social outcast, as part of a whole self-loathing dietary concern slash effort to bring down corporate America and its attempts to produce fleshy new members of the proletariat addicted to mass-produced chemically engineered flesh. Even if I didn't go around lecturing anyone on their diet (I knew better than to do that), my questions about the ingredients in a sauce and my demonstrated preference for side items rather than the main entrée were more than enough to alienate most if not the whole population of Forks, which, if my own father's own opinion on the topic was to be believed, was the _Hunting Capital of the World_. My father, too, struggled with my decision and I had caught him more than once trying to sneak meat into my food. _I forgot, _he'd say. Funny how he'd lecture me at least twice a week about needing to eat meat and then accidentally _forget_ about my determination not to do so. Fourteen years later, I occasionally came across people who still took it as a personal affront that I didn't eat meat. _Didn't I know, _they would ask, _that restaurants use the same grill, so you are eating meat anyway, and that there is meat in the rubber of your sneakers and that if you were ever stuck in a plane crash in the Andes you'd end up eating your fellow passengers to avoid starvation_. It made me wonder why they didn't just start gnawing on my arm right then and there if they had such certainty about the inevitability of cannibalism. But I said nothing. My indifference for others was more than enough to prevent me from engaging in disputations. There were rules and I followed them.

Which was why, lying in bed that morning, sick with the phantom sensations from my dream, I felt my hands curling into fists, a surge of anger washing over me. This wasn't about my peculiar eating habits. This was about the way that Edward had treated me in high school.

Whichever explanation one preferred, however, I wasn't the kind of person to become upset over things like that anymore. I didn't have a persecution complex. I didn't give a shit what other people thought of me.

The old me had cared, though. I remembered that much. Oh, she had cared. She had let them hurt her and she had burned and hated, even if she never had said a word out loud. She was angry and no one liked her. She followed no rules.

So maybe Alice was right. We had changed. And my dream showed that I was in danger of regressing.

I wouldn't let that happen.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

"Hello," I smiled at Edward Cullen—having mentally reverted to his full name in my head in an effort to distance myself, and realizing with some annoyance that I would have to take care to think of his as simply _Edward_, first name only, to feign intimacy—as he opened the door of his apartment. Or condo. I had never understood the difference between those two. Preference for the latter term just seemed like bullshit elitism to me. "Am I early?" I was exactly on time, having waited downstairs twenty minutes to be sure of it before pressing the buzzer for him to let me up. But a query as to the appropriateness of one's punctuality fills the time and suggests that you care.

"Just on time," he smiled back, looking pleasantly surprised by my show of friendliness.

"I've brought a spice cake," I said, proffering the foil covered plate.

"Oookay," Edward replied, showing me inside.

"I suppose it's not your usual Murder Club fare, but I don't smoke, so I thought, what the hell?"

"Smoke?"

"A meerschaum pipe. You know, like Sherlock. And I don't have one of those hats with the floppy ears, either. Though they're very popular with the young people so I could probably get one, though it probably wouldn't be authentic."

Edward shook his head. "I guess not." There was a pause before he waved a hand in a sweeping motion. "So there's the living room. Make yourself comfortable."

I glanced at the walls, a very homey cream, with ridiculous hunting paintings of hounds and horses, the horsemen all done up in English riding costumes. I nearly guffawed, ready to mock Edward's choice in art, when I spied the portraits. Somber, proper depictions, but others that were less staid, all of them circa-American Revolution and not unlike the work of John Copley, Thomas Gainsborough, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Joshua Reynolds, though of course I wasn't learned enough to identify any of the artists for certain and had no desire to seem as if I admired anything belonging to Edward. If the portraits were a trifle more whimsical than I would have expected—suggestive of a spirit which I could have endorsed—and the kind of thing that I wouldn't have minded owning myself, that was all the more reason to resent that someone like Edward would have them hanging on his walls.

_Tacky,_ I said to myself. _Who hangs up shit like that?_

_Isabella Swan would_, I couldn't help but admit a beat later, _if she could get away with it._ Instead my walls were covered with Giovanni Piranesi, Caspar Friedrich, Edward Burne-Jones, Aubrey Beardsley, and of course Henry Fuseli. Cheap prints, too, all of which I'd purchased from or else photocopied in color from library books. Not fancy reproductions like Edward had, full-sized and on canvas, with daubs of real paint.

The living room was even worse: Edward had a fucking fire place with a metal grate and iron tongs. And that's when I realized the difference between a condo and an apartment.

I reminded myself that he was a fascist capitalist and seated myself on the settee. The plush, black and red stripes of the upholstery and the faux cherry woodwork nicely coordinated with the rich burgundy of the thick carpet. "This is a fantastic reproduction," I said primly, patting the settee and happy to show that I was capable of complimenting someone I hated.

"It's an original."

"Oh." _Fuck my life. _I started to put the plate down on the marble-topped mahogany Rococo coffee table and froze.

"Go ahead. It's fine," Edward said.

"I'd rather not," I smiled and set the plate down on my lap, eyeing the intricate scrollwork of the coffee table's legs. It probably wasn't even called a coffee table. It probably had a tremendous French name that all my reading of Victorian literature had somehow failed to communicate.

Edward dropped several binders down on the table, then reached into my lap for the dish, his sudden proximity surprising me, and he set the plate down on a corner of the table. He pulled a leather wingback chair up on the other side of the pseudo-coffee table—_a _leather_ armchair, and note my animal-loving self saying nothing about it—_and sat down.

"So this is it," he explained. "And that," he cocked his head to the side and I glanced over, my eyes bugging out at the sight of a cork board, at least six feet by six feet, covered in pictures.

"Is this for real?" I asked, my tone much more serious than my previous pretense at joviality had allowed.

"Yes."

"This is—" I didn't want to say it. Even to someone I didn't like. It would be so—so cruel. And that wasn't me. That was never me. I scheduled happy hours and baked birthday cakes so that people never felt like they were forgotten. I observed the rules of social interaction to ease anxiety and preserve the illusion of civilized community. Whenever there was an awkward pause in a conversation or at a social gathering, I did and/or said something to fill it, and usually the thing that I did or said was awkward, so that the people observing me could say to themselves _at least I'm not her_ and feel a boost of self-esteem_. _Conversation would then resume, usually about whatever awkward thing I had just did or said. I didn't mind. That was a social function that I could easily perform. I could be weird. Cruelty was for the Edward Cullens and Jasper Hales of the world.

"Crazy?" he supplied. "I know."

I studied him. The wearied expression. The bags under his eyes that didn't quite mar what I knew others would think of as good looks. He looked so _sad_. Just like I'd always imagined Maxim de Winter looking—sad good looks that would make one not care what Maxim had done to his first wife. I didn't like it. I had no interest in feeling sympathy for the asshole who'd had a starring role in making high school hell.

I pursed my lips.

"You can say it," Edward said.

I shook my head.

"It's not like I haven't heard it before," he told me.

_You _are_ crazy,_ I thought, but didn't say out loud. Instead, I pulled a pencil and a pad of paper out of the messenger bag I'd brought along with me—showing that I'd come prepared—and opened the first binder. It contained a timeline of all of the events associated with the death of Tanya Denali.

Edward stopped me. "Maybe you should write up your own timeline first," he said. "Not let yourself be tainted by what I've already got."

I was confused. "My own timeline?"

"Just what you remember about that time. I've got stuff going back months, but you could just do the days immediately preceding everything."

"I don't understand. Why?"

"You might remember something that no one else has."

"I don't think so."

"Try it. Will you?"

I shrugged and sat back with my pad of paper. "Okay."

Edward jumped up. "I forgot to offer you something to drink. Do you want anything?"

"No, that's alright."

"Not even coffee? To go with your cake?"

Coffee _would _be good with my cake, and the rules called for the acceptance of amenities as a demonstration of good faith. Even if one would rather drink poison. "Sounds good."

"How do you like your coffee?"

"Um, do you have soy?" I asked absently, then continued very quickly: "Whatever you have is fine, just some kind of cream and sugar." But I messed it up again: "_Real_ sugar. Not sugar free."

I couldn't help cringing at my behavior. Surely, one didn't make demands of a person before whom one was attempting to feign indifference despite the presence of an innate suspicion born of years of torment at said person's hands.

"I have real sugar and almond milk," he said.

"I love almond—I mean that's fine. Thanks." Jesus fucking Christ. I started on my timeline.

Edward came back a few minutes later with a tray—a fucking gorgeous black tray made of a wood that was probably ebony, with even more of that Rococo-looking scrollwork, that was so pretty that I wanted to lick it even though it was probably two hundred years old—loaded down with two cups and plates and silverware. At least the dishware looked relatively recent and not too expensive. Which was just as well. I wasn't one of those people who thought that a chamber pot made a really good serving dish if you washed it enough times.

Edward pulled the foil off of the cake and cut two pieces, spilling crumbs on the carpet, I noticed as I watched out of the corner of my eye, watching not because I cared if he made more work for the maid that I was sure that he had but because I didn't know what to write. He set the pieces down on the plates and put one down in front of me and took one for himself. I kept my head down, studying the list that I was trying to write out, refusing to watch him as he tasted the cake I'd baked from scratch. Because I was a fucking good spice cake baker, everyone said so, and I didn't give a fuck if he agreed.

"Mmm, this is really fucking good," Edward hummed.

I could feel myself blushing. _Goddamn it_. What did I care if he liked my cake? Everyone liked my cake. He was just acknowledging an already accepted truth. Not that I would have expected anything half so rational from the boy—the man—who'd I known ten years ago.

I was seriously losing my shit. So what if he had an apartment—a _condominium_—straight out of an eighteenth century wet dream? I _taught_ the eighteenth century.

And sometimes dreamt of living it.

"Like I said," I reminded him, because I needed to break the train of thought that I was currently on. "I don't think I've really got anything to add." I handed him my pad.

_Sometime after lunch, I drove to the west end pass of the park, leaving my car in the last turn off and started to hike in._

_A few hours later, I saw Edward in the meadow at end of the blue trail. I waited a few minutes, thinking that he was going to leave, but he stayed. I double-backed and went up the white trail, and sat on the rocks overlooking the bluff for about an hour._

_Around the same time, an eye witness saw someone picking Tanya up in front of a restaurant in Port Angeles in a car _

_I came back and checked the meadow. Edward was still there. I hiked back to my truck. It was after nine o'clock and already dark by the time I made it to the turn off where I'd parked._

_Tanya was found._

"You're sure this is right?" he asked me.

"Except for Tanya getting in the car and being found, yeah. They made me write it out a couple of times."

"How do you know that you were sitting on the bluff for an hour?"

"I was trying to give you time to leave. It was at least an hour."

He thought for a moment. "You didn't write down anything that happened before that morning."

"What would I write?"

"Anything strange that you noticed."

"Like what?"

"New people in town. Gossip."

"Who would I gossip with? Alice? The less we knew about all of you, the better. The only thing she gossiped about was designers. Fashion designers and the latest trends."

"What about new people in town?" Edward asked.

"Whoever did this knew you. The killer wasn't some newcomer."

"He might have known me from Port Angeles. We went there sometimes to party. He could have come to Forks looking for information."

"Information?"

"Like where Tanya was going to be and when. Or where I was going to be."

"I don't remember anything like that. I don't think I would have noticed."

"You wouldn't notice someone new in town going around asking a lot of questions?" he was becoming agitated.

"Edward, if someone was going around asking questions about the two of you, don't you think someone would have told the police afterwards? And no, I wouldn't have noticed. I am not—what do you call them?—I'm not a _people watcher_."

"Everyone watches people."

"Not me."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't give a fuck about what other people are doing." I picked up my fork and took a bite of the cake. It _was_ fucking delicious.

"Fine," he huffed. "I guess it doesn't matter. You can look at the other timeline."

I reopened the binder, since he'd closed it to preserve my memory intact, and started to read. It was pretty detailed. Down to hours and minutes.

Some of it just looked like overkill. He had Tanya's birthday party six months before the day she died. I ignored that.

There was some stuff I didn't know about though. Like Edward breaking up with Tanya two days before she died because he'd caught her cheating with Mike Newton.

I had seen that coming.

Part of me wanted to ask Edward if he could have really been all that surprised by her cheating. Another part of me wanted to ask him if he really was capable of caring about something like that, but there were rules. I held my tongue. Several pages of the binder were taken up by maps and trail routes. I only glanced at them.

The pertinent facts, as I saw them, were:

_2 pm Tanya drives to Port Angeles with her sisters, Irina and Kate, to go shopping. _

_2 pm Edward has a fight with his parents as the latter are leaving for the weekend. His parents drive away in their car. Edward immediately exits out of the back of his house, heading for a trail that meets up with the edge of his parent's property and leads up into the national park. He makes a nineteen mile hike to the top of the blue trail and spends the afternoon in the meadow. _

_4 pm Tanya leaves her sisters in a coffee shop, telling them that she's going to run back to a store to purchase a pair of shoes she'd changed her mind about buying. She never makes it to the shoe store._

_4:15 pm Tanya is seen by a waitress getting into a silver Volvo in front of _Bella Italia_. The driver has short red hair. _

_4:15 – approximately 5 pm, a person or persons unknown drive(s) Tanya to a cabin in the outskirts of Port Angeles. Tanya enters the cabin of her own volition or is carried in. Blows delivered to Tanya's head prior to her death were sufficient to render victim unconscious and are consistent with being struck several times by the driver of car while she was seated in the passenger seat._

_Approximately 5 pm, a person or persons unknown make(s) several incisions in the creases behind Tanya's elbows and knees, as well as the neck and inner thigh, all at points where significant blood loss could be expected._

_Approximately 5:15 pm Tanya expires._

_6:30 pm police respond to an anonymous phone call originating from a pay phone in Forks to find Tanya deceased._

_9:07 pm sunset._

_It's already dark by the time Edward makes it home._

I redirected Edward's own question towards himself. "How sure are you about this?"

"There's a record for the phone call from Tanya to her father when she was leaving for Port Angeles. And a receipt for the coffee house. My parents had a receipt for the gas station when they left and thank God there was some reporter filming a bit on highway repaving to prove that they really did go. They checked into their hotel in Seattle three hours later so no one could challenge that either. The part about when she died is speculation, of course, but they've got that stuff down pretty good these days. And obviously the police know when they got the phone call and when they found her. The phone isn't even there anymore. It was behind _The Lodge_. No camera. No prints. No one saw anyone using it. And I have no idea who decided when sunset was, but I don't think they could have screwed that one up."

"Nineteen miles to the meadow and back. You ran track and field."

"It took me three hours each way, easy. I was hiking, not running, and even so I was out of breath. It's not an easy trail. You didn't come the same way I did. You parked at the turn off."

"But still—"

"Tanya's father got some guy who came in first place in the state for cross country the year before we graduated to run it. He got six hours and fifteen minutes round trip. And that was without an hour sitting in the middle of a fucking field twiddling his thumbs." Edward was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his hair tangled in his fists.

I waited a beat. "Maybe someone gave you a ride."

His eyes flashed to mine. "No one gave me a fucking ride. They questioned everyone who went through the toll booth that day. No one hid me in their trunk."

"Maybe you drove yourself."

"I would have had to go through the fucking toll booth myself. There would have been a record."

"Maybe you used a mountain bike."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Did you?"

He sat up. "A mountain bike would have only helped part of the way. It would have been impossible to use one across the entire trail."

"So you used it when it was convenient and hid it behind some brush."

"What then? I took a mountain bike, which I don't own and never have owned, part way up a fucking mountain. Hid it behind a tree. Went up the rest of the way on foot. Sat in a meadow waiting for a girl that I didn't know was going to show up, so that she could see me sitting there and give me an alibi, then I went back, got on the bike, road the rest of the way home, got in my car, drove to Port Angeles, killed Tanya and then came home again? Oh, and at some point, I got rid of the bike so that no one would know that I'd used it."

"Maybe it was spur of the moment. You didn't expect me to be there to see you but you also didn't plan to go kill Tanya."  
>"The police found her at 6:30. It's eight miles over easy terrain from the meadow to the turn off. I don't care how out of shape you were or how many times you stopped to gawk at a fern, there is no way that you took such a long time to get back to your truck that I would have had time to get to Port Angeles and back, even with a mountain bike, after you saw me in that meadow. It takes at least an hour to drive to Port Angeles from Forks even if you're speeding."<p>

"Eight miles. Say it took me three hours. That's with time for huffing and puffing over easy terrain and gawking at ferns. It was after nine by the time that I made it back to my truck. I remember because I couldn't see. I had to use my hands to feel for the lock. It gets dark in the woods there fast. So I saw you at six at the latest, and again, an hour previously, around five, which was when she was killed. Your alibi is still good even if I was faster. It would have taken me an hour and a half at least. That's 7:30 and 6:30. You couldn't have made the call, and I don't think you could have killed her either."

"Sure about that?" Edward snapped.

I nodded.

"Much obliged."

"No problem." I waved a hand dismissively. "So who hated Tanya enough to kill her and hated you enough to set you up for her murder?"

**AN: Are you getting the gist of the murder? Or is it still too vague? Would you have preferred that the contents of the list be communicated via discussion? And did I overreach with that whole thing about the dead squirrel dream as an expression of repressed vegetarian/outcast rage overreaction, followed by guilt over feeling rage, followed by resentment over feeling guilt for feeling rage?**

**Rec: Resurfacing by NewTwilightFan – I love a cold-hearted, distant Bella!**

**Oldie: It's an Alice story - **In the Days of Auld Lang Syne: Fix You by Feisty Y. Beden


	6. Chapter 6

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 5

'_When once sordid interest seizes upon the heart, it freezes up the source of every warm and liberal feeling; it is an enemy alike to virtue and to taste—_this_ it perverts and _that_ it annihilates.' – Ann Radcliffe_

BPOV

_Last time, on _Gothic_: Our heroine, Bella Swan, graciously consented to accept the invitation to a tete-a-tete at the luxury condominium of one Edward Cullen, where she and her host proceeded to discuss that most stimulating of subjects, Murder Most Foul. _

"I made a list of everyone that I thought might have had a grudge against us," Edward said.

"Don't you think that the police already looked into them?" I asked.

"We should still go over them. In case there's something they missed."

"Fine."

He pushed another binder towards me.

I opened to a list labeled as _Suspects._

"Are you sure that I didn't do it?" I inquired before I started reading.

"Why would you have given me an alibi if you had?"

"To make you beholden to me. To make you _my slave_." I wasn't saying anything that I hadn't already been accused of doing.

"I might not have seen you that day in the woods, but you saw me, or someone working with you did. There's no way that you could have known that I would be in that meadow at that point. Not even _I _knew that I was going to be there before I sat down."

Not replying, I started reading the list. "This is a joke," I laughed, studying the first name.

"What?"

"Eric?"

"He keyed my car."

"Was that before or after you spent years tormenting him? He may have keyed your car but he didn't set you up for murder."

"He might have."

"And I'm sure you would have deserved it."

"Tanya didn't."

I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. Yes, I had agreed to try to solve Tanya's murder. But I hadn't agreed to start liking her, and I was hardly going to become all weepy-eyed over a bitch who had been in the ground for ten years.

She might not have deserved it, but I wasn't prone to sentiment.

"Who're these guys?" I asked of the next two names on the list, a Felix Manning and Demetri Giampetroni.

"Felix was sleeping with Tanya. At least, I think he was. And Demetri is the brother of that waitress in Port Angeles who saw Tanya get into a car that looked just like mine."

I had started flipping through the rest of the notebook.

"Holy shit, you've been stalking them."

"I haven't been stalking them."

"You've got pictures of one of them at a fucking gas station with a date on it from a year ago. That's stalking." The pictures weren't even the half of it. Edward had lists of all of the places they'd worked, everywhere they'd lived, the names of known associates, and lists of all of the crimes reported in their vicinity for the last ten years. It was a little disturbing, to say the least.

"I didn't take those pictures myself. My PI did. It's not stalking if you get someone else to do it for you."

I wasn't sure that was true, but I decided not to push it. "Why them?"

"Felix was a mechanic at the place where Tanya's father took his cars. I saw Tanya hanging around the place once or twice. She always said that she was just there for an oil change and Felix was showing her how to do it herself."

I couldn't help laughing.

Edward saw the humor as well. "Exactly. Tanya, on the ground changing her oil? I think not. Why the hell would a thirty year old mechanic hang around with an eighteen year old girl? It's fucking creepy."

I decided not to point out that stalking was pretty fucking creepy itself. "And this other guy?"

"Well, that waitress' story was clearly bullshit, because I wasn't in Port Angeles picking Tanya up. So she was covering for someone. Who better than her own brother? He was arrested just a month after Tanya died for beating up his girlfriend. He's had more arrests since them, but he's only gotten actual time once, because the women involved almost always refuse to press charges against him."  
>"So you've been stalking them for ten years because you think they did it?"<p>

Edward sat back in his seat. "Someone killed Tanya. It wasn't me. So who the fuck was it? If the police had just done their job, Tanya's killer would be behind bars now. Do you know that they didn't even question Felix? And they never bothered checking up on the waitress. You would think that they would have been just a little suspicious about their own star witness."

He had a point, though I wasn't convinced that it justified going all Jake Gyllenhall from _Zodiac_. I closed the notebook and folded my arms. "This is no good," I concluded.

"Why not?"

"You're ignoring all of the real suspects."

"Like who?"

"Jasper Hale. James What's his name. Or that dick Newton. And his slut girlfriend. Or that other whore. The one with the hair."

"Jasper was in another state. Everyone else was at a party on First Beach when Tanya was killed."

"Why weren't you at the party?"

"I'd just caught Tanya cheating, remember?"

I stared at him blankly. "I wasn't exactly on anyone's _Vapid Gossip _speed dial."

He continued. "We were going away to college in the fall. I didn't want to deal with that juvenile shit anymore. We were supposed to be adults. Besides, I'd had a fight with my parents and just needed a break from everything for a while. Why weren't _you_ at First Beach?"

"You're kidding me right?" I waited for the punch line. None came, so I said, "I guess my invitation got lost in the mail."  
>"Well everyone else was at First Beach that day. The entire class as well as the one before us and the one after, <em>and<em> the kids from the res. They all gave each other alibis."

"Even Eric?"

Edward glared down at his list of suspects. "Yes, even Eric. But I'm not sure that I trust the testimony of drunken teenagers."

"But you're willing to trust that drunken testimony when it comes to your friends?"

"You can't be serious," Edward shook his head.

"I am absolutely serious. I think it makes perfect sense that it was an inside job by one of the—" I struggled for an appropriate term for the crowd of ravenous fiends who had made my youth a living fucking nightmare, for surely the term _friend_ implied a level of compassion of which they were utterly incapable, "—by one of your _people._" I ticked the reasons off on my fingers. "First, you were all back-stabbing bitches. Second, it was someone who knew you well enough to pull this off. Third, it was someone who could get a silver Volvo and get rid of it without anyone knowing. Either renting it out of state or borrowing it from someone who wouldn't run his mouth. So it wasn't Dollar Store Eric or someone from La Push. And that's just keeping the list down to people our age, like this is _Buffy _seasons 1 and 2. You've got to go season 3. Like, the mayor."

"Forks doesn't have a mayor. And why would someone that important have a grudge against me?"

"Maybe it was a grudge against Tanya's parents."

"Tanya's mother died before any of this happened. Her father won't talk to me."

"Your parents then."

Edward snorted. "I can't talk to them about this."

"You can't ask your own parents why someone set you up for murder?"

Edward stared at the binders sitting on the pseudo-coffee table. "They don't want anything to do with this. They think that I've got to put it behind me."

"That's fucked up. Your girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—died and people blamed you. How are you supposed to just put that behind you?"

He snorted. "That's what I said."

I turned to a new page in my pad. "So let's make a list of things to check on."

"Don't you want to finish going through the binders?"

I flipped open the cover of the last one. It was a fucking morgue photo. I closed it again. "No."

"There's more in there. About possible serials and whatnot. There were only drunken disorderlies in Port Angeles at the time, and some guy got killed in Seattle by his ex-wife, but if we cast a wider net, there were a couple of other suspicious events. One or two crimes that even seemed ritualistic."

I didn't like the sound of _ritualistic_. "We've already decided that it couldn't have been a random serial killer. Not with a silver Volvo and short red hair. That would be pushing credibility just a bit too far."

"Maybe you should look just to be sure."

"Is there anything about cannibalism in there?"

"No."

"I'm a vegetarian."

"Okay."

"I mean it. I will throw up on your fancy rug if there is any cannibalism in that notebook. I don't care if you think I'm full of shit and that I'd eat a plane-full of fellow travelers if I was ever stranded in the Andes. I've never even seen any of the _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_s. And I _love_ horror."

"There's no cannibalism."

"Fine." I flipped the notebook open again, and quickly went past the morgue photo, holding it by the edges to turn the page, which was completely ridiculous because it was just a picture, but I couldn't help but feel like it had the power to somehow leech through my pores. _Miasma_. Which made me feel like a bitch because Tanya was dead and it was supposed to be sad.

There were crime scene photos too. I didn't want to look at that either.

I sat up. "Can't you just be in charge of this part?" I gestured to the picture in front of me, showing what looked like the blood-drenched floor of a shack. "I can be in charge of something else. Like feeding us. I'll even get meat for you. I'll have someone else prepare it because I don't believe in feeding someone something that I wouldn't taste for myself, but I could be in charge of that. Or translation. Like if there's any Latin or French to translate. I can read many languages. I even took a semester of Hebrew. I don't remember any of it. But I'm sure that there's something else that I could do to be of help."

He looked at me with an expression that I supposed was meant to be sympathetic, but that emotion didn't make sense coming from him so it just annoyed me. "Do the pictures really bother you that much? I guess that I've just gotten used to them. I don't even think about—I don't even really think about them as _her_ any more. I suppose it helps that I'm a doctor. You wouldn't mind seeing it in person, would you? I was hoping that you would come out to the cabin with me."

I felt my jaw fall open. "After ten years?" I finally managed to ask. "What the hell would we see?"

Edward shrugged. "I don't know. I've gone before. It's not dangerous or anything."

"Not _dangerous_? Like the Devils' Rejects aren't going to come at us with knives from behind some trees?" I paused, realizing that I needed to convey to him the full gravity of the situation. "I am a fan of Rob Zombie's oeuvre, both musical and cinematic. I even like his remake of _Halloween._ I have absorbed his teachings. Lesson One: I don't ask for directions. Ever. And I don't have a GPS. I get lost all of the time. I joke that if I haven't made at least one u-turn on the way to somewhere, that I never went. It is a life's goal of mine never to be directed to a shack in the middle of nowhere inhabited by a serial killer who wants to have fun with my parts. Lesson Two: I don't go to shacks in the middle of nowhere on purpose, either."

He cough-laughed at me, the effort to hide his reaction suggesting that laughter wasn't something he was used to. Not that he should be. Not about this. Or maybe he just wasn't comfortable around the likes of me.

"So _you_ think it's funny now?" I asked.

Edward sobered. "Sorry. Look, I think you'll be fine. It's just a cabin. You used to like the woods. You liked hiking."

I didn't say anything. I didn't like this. I didn't like any of this.

I pulled out my pad again. "As I was saying, things we ought to look into: One, grudges people might have had against your parents and the Denalis. Two," I gritted my teeth, "cabin in the woods." I stopped. "You do know that's the name of a fucking horror movie right? _Cabin in the Woods._"

He cough-laughed again.

"I'm not getting eaten," I warned him.

He nodded.

I reconsidered. "Well I don't care if I get eaten but I'm not eating anyone else. You have to kill me before they make me eat someone." He wasn't taking this seriously. I wasn't joking. "_I mean it!_"

"Alright, alright." He was outright laughing. "I can't believe I'm reacting like this. It isn't funny."

He kept saying that—that it wasn't funny—but the Edward Cullen I remembered from the _Roiling Abyss_ used to laugh _at_ me all of the time. He used to enjoy watching others suffer. "What else?" I asked.

"That witness in Port Angeles. The waitress who saw Tanya get into that car. It was just too convenient that she happened to see a car that looked just like mine. I had my PI look into her, though, and he couldn't find any proof that she'd been bribed."

"Bribed?"

"How else do you explain her claiming to see me driving my car when I was sixty miles away? Unless she was covering for her brother."

"Do you want to question her?"

"I already have. She threatened to have me arrested if she ever saw me again."

"So what do you want to do?"

"Can you question her?"

I didn't think that would work. I was hardly the type of person who could manipulate a person into confessing that she'd been mistaken or had willingly lied. "Why me?"

"I can't talk to her again."

_Bella Swan, Interrogator_ seemed like a non-starter to me, but I added it to the list. "What about the car?" I asked. "Is there something we can do about that?"

"I hired a private investigator to look into rentals in the state. There weren't any around that time."

"What about our new list of suspects?"

He laughed again. "Jasper? Why not Alice?"

"She was in Mississippi with her cousins." I sighed. "Alright fine. Not Jasper. Though I would like to know how tight his alibi really is. But the rest of them. We ought to do something about them too. Don't you have Facebook or Myspace or something? A way to keep up with all of your besties?"

"I don't have a Myspace account. And Jasper is the only friend from high school that I keep up with. I can ask Jasper if he's kept in touch with anyone. Worst case scenario, I'll use the PI again."

"Won't that be expensive?"

"It doesn't matter."

To him maybe. Adjunct professors aren't exactly rolling in it.

"Besides," he shrugged. "I still think it was Eric. Or one of those other fuckers." He pointed at the _Suspect Notebook._ "What we really need to do is to figure out how to break their alibis."

If their alibis could be broken, wouldn't he have gone to the police about with their names already?

_Speaking of alibis_. "Wait," I said. "It was so dark when I got to my truck that night that I couldn't see the lock, but it takes a while to get that dark after sunset. I'm sure it won't make a difference to the timeline or else the cops would have caught it. But how long does it take to get dark take in July?"

"It gets dark pretty fast in the woods, doesn't it? With the trees and the mountains?"

"I suppose so. It probably depends on the weather too. It was cloudy that day. I kept thinking it was going to rain. We can check how fast it normally gets dark after sunset. It's not the right season now, but I can ask the guys in La Push. They'll probably have an idea."

"The guys in La Push?" Edward asked, sounding oddly defensive.

"What's wrong with them?" I didn't like his tone.

"They don't really like me." He crossed his arms.

"I'm not surprised," I mumbled under my breath.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't mean anything." I hadn't meant for him to hear me.

"Bullshit."

He was really going to call me out? He was becoming belligerent, I decided. Probably misdirected guilt for laughing earlier. Had he ever felt guilty for laughing at me back in high school? No.

I said, "You were an asshole back then." And probably still were. "I'm not surprised that they didn't like you." I actually had had friends down in La Push when I was in high school. Okay, maybe not friends. But I had hung out there sometimes when Charlie would visit Billy. Emily was nice. Leah was a bitch and Paul was an obnoxious dick.

"I'm the asshole? Do you know what they used to say when I would show up at First Beach? _Here comes the white man to claim the ocean._"

"Well white guys kind of did take everything." I thought Edward was overreacting. "And maybe they thought that you were there looking for that pirate gold everyone's always going on about."

"You're white too, and there is no pirate gold."

"I'll have you know that I am eight percent Cherokee," I snapped. I conceded the pirate gold point but didn't see the value of saying so out loud.

"You don't look it."

"At least I don't glow in the dark." _Take that_, I thought, remembering all the times in high school that I'd had to listen to skanks wax lyrical about the so-called Greek god. I had been fairly nice to Edward all that afternoon. But enough was enough.

His eyebrows nearly joined his hairline. "_Glow_ in the dark?"

"You do don't you?" I pictured that Greco-Roman statue of a dying Gaul, the stone a sickly white.

"I have a proud Celtic heritage—"

"And you glow in the dark. That's probably why your people lost to the Romans. And to the English. Fucked up all of your nighttime raids."

"The Cherokee didn't exactly win either."

I threw down my pencil. "You really want to go there?"

"You started it."

"I started it?" I repeated, flabbergast. "What the fuck do you think high school was?"

"Oh, so now we come down to it. We finally come to the truth. You're holding a grudge against me."

"I don't give a fuck."

"Oh, you give a fuck."

"You're not important enough for me to care about."

"Then why the hell are you so angry?"

I huffed. "I'm not angry. You're just an asshole. You're still an asshole. If I'm angry," I ventured, possibly contradicting myself, "it's because of the asshole that you are being _now_, not the one you were _then_."

"How am I being an asshole now? What have I done to you since we met back up that could possibly have offended you?"

"You—you're racist. And you're a doctor. I don't like doctors. _And you're rich_."

"If I'm racist, you're racist. You're a self-hating mostly Caucasian. And doctors help people. Unlike teachers, who brainwash their students. And you're a classist."

"I don't brainwash my students. I let them make up their own minds. Unless you think that the promotion of critical thinking is in and of itself antithetical to the right wing agenda, which is the same as admitting that Republicans just want to keep people too stupid to know what the government is doing. Just like the Europeans using treaties written in languages that the First Nations People didn't understand. Boundary lines don't mean shit to nomads. And _classist_? What the fuck is that?"

"You hate rich people."

"Well maybe I do."

"You don't think there's anything wrong with that?"

"There _isn't_ anything wrong with that. They're in charge of the world and the world's fucked up, so it must be their fault. Besides, it's not like I'm doing them any harm."

"I'll have you know that my family and I give substantial contributions to charity every year."

"And I'm sure that's not for the fancy tax write-off."

"You're ridiculous. You have me defending positions that I don't even support. I'm not rich."

"Ha!" I held up the ebony tray that I wanted to lick. "What the hell is this?"

"That's my mothers."

Momma's boy. "Yet it just so happens to be sitting in your apartment. And it's called an _apartment_. Calling it a condominium doesn't make you better than other people."

"I never said that I was better than other people."

"My God—what was high school? Of course you thought you were better than other people, and you made sure that everyone else knew it."

"So this _is_ about high school."

"Ugh!" I threw my hands up and screamed. "I can't stand being around you."

"Then get out."

"You get out. My people want their land back."

"You're only eight percent."

"It's called genocide, jerk."

"My family didn't migrate to the U.S. until 1910. We didn't push anyone out."

"Well isn't it convenient that all of the natives had already been cleared out for you?"

"You're fucking crazy."

"I'm not the one with a cork board covered with pictures of a dead girl."

**AN: Another old rec: (warning – I not only cried, I wanted to hunt Edward down at one point, and it wasn't to give him a round of applause) ****These Dreams**** By: ****moxieandmirth**** A violent attack senior year leaves Bella ready to leave Forks behind & start a new life in L.A. She begins to heal & finds a friend in her new boss, but when Love comes knocking at her door Bella finds herself too haunted by the past to answer. AH/BxE**


	7. Chapter 7

**Meyer owns all.**

**Bribe added at bottom.**

Chapter 6

'_To terror succeeded a languor and lassitude not without charm—passivity, acquiescence, indulgence—he felt, as it were, the strong caress of another will flowing over him like water and clothing him with invisible hands in an impalpable garment.' – Count Stenbock_

BPOV

_ Last time on _Gothic_, our heroes were engaging in one of those verbal contests that are so stimulating to the senses. If they were behaving with less decorum than one expects to find in polite society, that is perhaps to be expected of the modern generation, amongst whom there is such disregard for proper manners. Yet even our heroine might be willing to admit that she went perhaps a little too far when she implied that a man who keeps a cork board covered with pictures of a dead girl is, in point of fact, fucking crazy._

Forgiveness may be asked with regards to an unintended faux pas, so long as the breech has not been too serious or the price of admitting the breech too high.

Perhaps I ought not to have inferred that Edward Cullen was insane just because he had a six foot by six foot cork board covered with pictures of a dead girl. After all, such a collection has a role in habituating the viewer to the grotesque. Without habituation, how could anyone expect to face such a horrific thing rationally?

Besides, there were other pictures on the cork board. Photographs of a cabin in the woods, a pay phone behind a restaurant and a silver Volvo. Yearbook photos too. Almost our entire graduating class and some juniors and the preceding class as well.

I apologized for implying that I thought that Edward was crazy, which was probably hypocritical. Logically speaking, he couldn't really have been operating on all cylinders, could he? I thought back to my days of armchair psychoanalysis during my undergraduate fling with the _Mountains of Madness_. His behavior suggested obsessive compulsion, at the very least.

He accepted my apology.

The silence following our reconciliation was awkward. I said that I had to be going, which was true. He complimented me again for my cake and asked me when I would be available to drive to Port Angeles.

The reference to a road trip surprised me, though I should have expected it. I told him that we could go the following weekend, if he was free.

He said that it was difficult to get an entire weekend off. I told him my teaching schedule and he suggested that we leave on a Thursday night and come back Saturday. I said that would be fine.

It was only after I left that I registered the humming. My entire body was humming, from my fingertips, along my arms and down my spine. I felt almost dizzy. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if it was the exhilaration of having someone who could give it back just as good as I gave it without getting his feelings hurt—though I supposed that his feelings had been hurt in the end, unless that was just me worrying after someone else's feelings when I should have been more concerned with my own.

Or maybe I was trembling, not humming, my symptoms suggestive of extreme emotional distress, having fallen victim to overwrought nerves and the apprehension surrounding the discussion of unsavory topics. I wasn't used to so much excitement. I wasn't used to spending so much time in the company of someone who provoked so much hostility, for perhaps the sweetest pleasure of maturity is being able to choose those with whom we do and do not associate.

I realized that I had forgotten my plate with the cake. I hadn't even finished eating my piece. And I liked that cake!

It was my fault for bringing the whole thing. I should have only brought half—or a quarter. Edward Cullen only deserved a quarter of my cake. Probably not even that.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I spent the rest of the afternoon buying and chopping up the ingredients for Seth's tasting menu. _Tasting menu_—his words, not mine. I supposed that it made sense that he wanted to feed everyone who showed up for his gallery opening. Art, minus food, would put all of the focus on the art, whereas art plus food would mean that it was just a party with pretty things to look at. It would create much less pressure.

The following day, Seth, Jane and Alice carefully considered the meager range of my amateur offerings, and chose the peppermint cake balls, the spinach quiche and the tomato/mozzarella/basil skewers. Jane pointed out that none of these choices were particularly sophisticated. I pointed out that Seth was getting the preparation for free. Seth thanked me again and told Jane to shut the fuck up.

After Seth and Jane left, I cornered Alice and got her to admit that there was indeed a proposed engagement between she, myself and Jasper that week.

When was she going to tell me?

She just had.

What day?

Wednesday.

Where?

_Giana's_.

I hmmphed an acknowledgement.

She attempted an escape.

"Wait just one minute," I asked, falling back on the rote language of a sub-standard Hallmark Channel original. "How serious is this?" It was pretty damn serious, it seemed to me, if she was already expecting me to make nice. She had only done so only once before. The ramifications of that decision were not good. I had liked him well enough. But she was so invested that, when things went bad, they went really bad.

"I really like him," she said.

_How can you? _I wanted to ask. But was it my place? For a minute I thought of all of the times that she'd needed me to help her. I remembered what had happened last time, and what could happen this time, if things went bad.

It would be too vulgar though, the speaking of her secrets. I couldn't suggest such a thing to her.

I told her that I was happy for her and that I would be there on Wednesday.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

The new candidate for the Ancient Mediterranean position was giving a job talk on the juxtaposition of imagery involving sex and pain in Late Republican poetry, which was all fine and well except that the subject was at least two decades behind the curve on topical topics. Scholars had been doing Martial and his penetrating discourse for decades. These days, Apuleius and donkey shows were considered passé.

Of course no one thought of doing something really shocking and going back to the virgins. Poor virgins. No one cared about them, unless it was to corrupt them. Which didn't seem in the least bit fair.

Apathy, de Sade complained, was not the opposite of desire but rather the feigning of desire. Lack of spontaneity. It seemed to me that virgins weren't apathetic. They were just bored with the prospect of having to feign interest in something that hominids had been doing for millions of years. There was no room left for invention.

I could feel my fellow academes bristle with indignation at being held captive by the hopeful candidate's outline of a devastatingly dull dissertation. _How dare she ask them to be shocked!_ She didn't even reference Archilochus' premature ejaculation or the Roman youths castrating themselves for Attis, though that was probably for the best. One should never try to astonish a scholar with sexual pathos.

The doomed job candidate concluded her talk with a quote from Catullus on Clodia Polcher: "'_I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask, I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment_.'" Raising her eyes to the execution squad, oblivious to the fate awaiting her, the candidate smilingly uttered her final words. "So as you go forth in your lives, falling in and out of love, wasting time on one misguided adventure after another, remember that not even two great lovers like Clodia Pulcher and Catullus could make it last. After all, no one picks a poet over a dictator."

And with that, the shooting began. I cringed, listening as one faculty member after another tore the candidate apart. The worst was when the Modern Americanist asked for a definition of culture. "I don't understand," the Modern Americanist complained, "you call yourself a Cultural Historian and you can't even give us a viable definition of culture?!"

After the last shot was fired, Angela and I walked back to our offices. "I don't know," Angela mused quietly, "I bet Catullus let Clodia tie him down. I just don't see Julius Caesar doing that."

"Christ," Jasper whispered behind us. Where had he come from? "Y'all talk trash about Antebellum Americanists. But at least we don't pretend orgies are history."

"How are orgies not history?" Angela asked. "Sexual politics, and all that. The guy doesn't _always_ have to be on top. Isn't that right, Bella?"

_That's right. He can also be in another room, in another house, on another street._

Deigning not to answer, I bid them both adieu and ducked inside my office. I wasn't in the mood for witty banter, not even with Angela, and certainly not with Jasper. I wasn't in the mood for anything.

I had had another strange dream, and I didn't know what to do about it.

I'd dreamt of a bookshop this time, or what had appeared to be a bookshop. There weren't any clerks, but the place had the disorderly, deliciously decadent appearance of a place where items are for sale.

My dream-self had felt a thrill of ecstasy run through her as she scanned the place. It was a chaotic assemblage of every kind of book. Shelves were overstuffed. Books lay strewn in piles on the floor and on counters. There were ladders to allow one to ascend to the lofty heights of the bookcases. The place was clearly a den of inequity. A site of degenerate over-stimulation of the senses. Here was pleasure. Here was, dare one say, happiness.

And I was alone. There weren't any other patrons to spoil my enjoyment. I was left entirely by myself, at my leisure to please myself however I wished.

I rushed into the very midst of the disorderly bookcases, the shelving arranged like the walls of a labyrinth, and began scanning the bindings—multicolored like wildflowers—running my fingers over the spines and pulling down volumes at random. Such a torrent of words rushed past my eyes, the lines sounding in my ears, phrases that meant nothing at the time but that, upon waking, I realized were quotations from Rousseau, Goethe and others. In my dream, the words had been muddled, just bits and pieces that only became clear once I was fully awake, as flashes of the dream came to me while I readied for work, and as I later sat in that job talk on sexualized suffering in the Late Republic.

The candidate had provided a handout for us. I'd listened to her talk, staring at the page she'd provided, recalling a yellowed page from my dream and the script that curled across it, the ink bleeding through the leaf: _'I have never been truly accustomed to civil society_…'

The candidate, trying to situate the Bona Dae incident within the bevy of suspicion surrounding the Bacchae conspiracy decades earlier, had quoted Euripides: '_I have seen the holy Maenads, the women who ran barefoot and crazy from the city…they let their hair fall loose, down over their shoulders, and…fastened their skins of fawn with writhing snakes that licked their cheeks.'_

The Maenads—Bacchae—I remembered, had torn Pentheus apart, the blood running like water, and I saw again one of the volumes that I'd handled in my dream, the binding brilliant like blood, the gold lettering like the chain of a necklace across the spine, and a snippet of the text within: '_…the neighboring jaws of hell begin to open and to rage…_'

Citing the Greek antecedents of the Late Republican authors, the candidate referenced Archilochus and Sappho: '_Hair and breast steeped in perfume, she would wake desire in an old man,' _she read, and '_Like a rosy apple on a high branch is the maiden; the pickers have forgotten her.'_

I'd shaken my head at that, off-put by the surreal nature of it all—this struggle to concentrate on the candidate's lecture while fighting to ignore the irksome recollections from my dream.

I felt myself losing focus. I realized that I was becoming increasingly distracted, but was unable to resist the urge to try and recall as many details of the dream as possible.

I remembered another line: _'Man, awake is compelled to seek a perpetual escape._'

The candidate, reaching forward into the Empire, quoted Seneca: '_I see in myself, Lucilius, not just an improvement but a transformation_.'

And I recalled fumbling through the volumes, overly hasty, perhaps, not quite as respectful as I ought to have been. '_In vain your lover roves the world; the thought of you, Troubles each chamber where he lies; Even as you are true to him, he will be true, To you, no doubt, until he dies.'_ What was that from again?

But no—sitting in my office after the lecture, I remembered the source. I wished that I hadn't. The quotation was too awful in its full implications. '_Its secret parts exposed, its treasures all outspread, As if to charm a lover's eyes.' _

If the beloved, with all of its secret parts exposed, was the bookshop, and its treasures were the volumes that lay inside, then the bookshop was also the victim. A denuded body. '_A corpse without a head…The headless trunk, in shameless posture on the bed, Naked, in loose abandon lies.' _

And I was its murderer, its corruptor: '_Did he at length, that man, his awful thirst too great, For living flesh to satisfy, On this inert, obedient body consummate, His lust?'_

I recalled the rest of the dream then.

Oh, I had been alone in the bookshop for a while, left to my own devices to enjoy myself with the fair beauties, but soon enough the encroachments began. Interlopers. _Other patrons_. They slipped in quietly at first, as though they meant no harm. As though I didn't know just what they were there for.

They showed their true selves before long. Whispered injunctions became threats. Snarls began to sound as they became more frenzied in their inspection of the shelves, until they were grasping and fighting for the books they wanted. Shoving as they went down the aisles. It was a nightmare.

I had never been prone to violence—not even when it came to books—yet how far could I let myself be pushed?

I watched as the newcomers began to wrestle over the volumes, a few of the prizes being torn asunder in the process, sick desecrations too gross to be countenanced. I had to avert my eyes from the horror.

In the midst of so much anarchy, I proceeded with caution, trying to surreptitiously repel attempts to acquire those books in which I was interested, slipping the volumes discreetly from the shelves into my arms, arms that were already overburdened with selections, but each book that I carried was far too valuable to consider leaving behind. If only I could save them all. I consoled myself that I could save a few.

I was succeeding too, until Edward Cullen walked in.

'_Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit._'

Muscles already tensed with anxiety began to scream. My heart rate spiked. But no—it wouldn't do to give myself away.

I followed him through the aisles. He feigned ignorance of my presence, for surely he knew that I was behind him.

I eyed the books that he laid his hands upon, watching as he gathered them greedily into his arms. _One can bear only so much_, I thought.

And then I glimpsed the title of one of the books he'd grabbed.

I was going to kill him. It had happened before, collectors slaying each other for the possession of a rare tome. That was a reasonable defense, wasn't it? _'Your honor, he didn't deserve that book. It just couldn't be allowed._' I was going to go to prison, where I'd tutor the inmates in French and Enlightenment theories of aesthetics and we'd compose treatises against the injustices of tyranny.

Fortunately, I woke up before anything else could happen.

Remembering how the dream had ended, I looked around my office, knowing exactly what it meant.

I had come to imagine that there was a space around me, a narrow zone colonized by little pockets of peace that insulated me from everyone else. Oh sure, there might be a sally now and then from a precocious creature seeking to test the strength of my walls, but such efforts were all for naught. I was impregnable. If the Lady of Shallot left her tower, it was only because she didn't have enough books. I would never come down.

And now here was Edward Cullen attempting to storm the ramparts.

Consider the case of Person X: Awkward at best. Antisocial at worst. A lover of books and loved by them in return, for all that they were inanimate and dead. Who was this person to mix about with others, disrupting their lives as much as her own? She knew to stick to herself, for it was a mistake to think that one's happiness was contingent upon anyone else.

And I was content.

Content.

Until someone tried to take my books.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I was not too surprised when I found Edward sitting with Jasper when I arrived at _Giana's _for the much-anticipated getting-to-know-your-best-friend's-boyfriend/victim repast. Alice hadn't said anything about Edward coming, but I hadn't supposed that Jasper would venture very far without his dear ole comrade in arms.

I was determined to be congenial and charming, for anything less was beneath me. And any suggestion that I might continue to harbor hostility for past wrongs would imply weakness on my part. I would demonstrate that I was impervious to harm.

That was the plan. I had not factored in the fact that I was generally an epic fail.

"When I asked if you wanted a threesome, I meant with Alice, not Edward," I said to Jasper as I sat down. He and Edward choked on their beers and I pretended not to notice. I had meant it as a joke. Was it too much? I glanced around the restaurant, not wanting to make eye contact and unwilling to acknowledge their reaction to my words. "It seems busy tonight. I hope it doesn't get too loud. I hate places where you have to scream to be heard, you know?" As if the three of us had something in common. As if I, like them, was used to going to places with people who wanted to hear what I had to say.

Jasper and Edward were still coughing, so I babbled some more, not wanting to just sit there and watch them sputter uncomfortably. "I haven't seen you around much at the university this week," I said to Jasper. "Not that I necessarily would of course. I mean, you're all American and I'm mostly European. I do hope you support the bid to make the American Studies students learn at least a second language. The disparity in requirements is really ridiculous." The coughing had begun to subside. "You got the night off," I said to Edward. "That must be nice for you." I couldn't think of anything else to say. "Really nice."

Fortunately, Alice arrived then. We faux hugged. I had never been one for displays of overt affection, but as embraces are expected among American females of my age and doesn't really mean anything anyhow, I have learned to adapt.

When Alice noticed Jasper's distress, she hopped around the table and began patting him on the back. "You okay baby?"

This made me feel a trifle guilty, even if I felt that Alice was overdoing it with the _baby_. Should I have offered to help them in a similar fashion? I could have patted them both on the back at the same time. Very efficient.

Whatever my true feelings, we were all pretending to be cordial towards one another. And the rules of etiquette demand that one not sit idly by while someone else chokes to death. I looked at Edward. "Do you want me to pat you on the back?" I asked, hoping he would refuse, uneasy over the familiarity that an acceptance would imply.

"I'm fine," he croaked.

A waitress appeared and took drink orders as Alice sat down between Jasper and me.

"Dude," Edward accused when the coughing had finally subsided. Apparently, the suggestion of a ménage a trois had caused Edward to revert to his teenage patois. "A threesome?"

"To be honest," I clarified, "he was really talking to me and Angela. Alice wasn't even there."

Jasper sat up straight in his chair. "Ah suggested no such thang."

Alice had a finger pressed to her bottom lip. "You're such a gentleman," she simpered. I sincerely hoped that she was fucking with him.

He tipped his hat to her—except that he wasn't wearing a hat so he was just twitching his fingers in the air.

"You do know that you're not wearing a hat, right?" I asked.

Edward decided to run interference by asking if we wanted any appetizers.

I chose not to believe that he was implying that I enjoyed stuffing my face and conferred with Alice on the matter. When the waitress returned, we ordered an appetizer for the table and our individual meals.

Jasper then attempted to engage me in conversation. He said that he was excited to be reaching the middle of the semester because he had plans for a whole unit on the links between architecture and social mores. He was going to talk about how the entrance hall, for instance, had evolved to keep strangers at a distance while the servants' quarters had moved upstairs as a reflection of the changing class structure. If my face showed disinterest, it wasn't intentional. I certainly said nothing to suggest that I didn't find the subject utterly riveting. The truth was, I hadn't planned anything much more exciting for my own classes. But I'd promised myself that I wouldn't be subject to my old prejudices. So I was sure that any distaste that I felt for Jasper was related solely to his obvious inadequacies as an instructor of the youth.

"Chop anyone up today?" I asked Edward, because I didn't want Jasper talking to me anymore and Edward hadn't said much of yet. The rules of civilized social interaction call for the exclusion of no one. Hence, one should ask questions even if one doesn't care to hear the answer.

"That's kind of morbid," Jasper interjected.

"The Civil War was the birthplace of facial reconstructive surgery," I pointed out with a glare. I resented the implication that I might have given offense. "Ever take a gander at those pics? Talk about morbid."

Edward tried to run interference again. "I didn't do anything very interesting today. Just a couple of kids who were trying to get out of school and a few broken bones."

"Well that's good news, isn't it?" I held up my glass, happy to see that the conversation had turned the corner. "Cheers."

"What are we cheersing?" Alice inquired, confused, I could tell over the suggestion of frivolity amidst facial reconstruction and broke bones. So politically correct, she was.

"A boring day is sometimes a good day," Edward explained.

We all cheersed as our food arrived. I imagined that, to anyone seeing our table, the four of us must look like a bunch of old school chums, together again to relive the glory days. Asshole 1 now a tame history geek, Asshole 2 a veritable superhero who saved peoples' lives, Outcast 1 a temperamental clothes freak who still maybe changed personalities to match each day's wardrobe, and Outcast 2 a frigid morbid neurotic who still liked books better than people.

Yep, the best of friends.

Jasper and Alice began discussing authentic Civil War-era fabrics. I truly hoped that Jasper didn't want to involve my dear friend in the seductive world that was _reenactment_. I narrowed my eyes at the two of them in suspicion.

"So why don't you like doctors?" Edward asked me.

"What?" I made myself look at him. "Who said I don't like doctors?"

"You did."

Oh, that's right. I _had_ said that to him that day at his apartment/condo. "They're unfeeling, uncaring assholes," I said it without a trace of malice in my voice. I was merely stating fact.

"That doesn't even make sense. People become doctors to help people." Edward argued doggedly, but in a light tone, not taking offense.

"You didn't become a doctor to help people," I reminded him. "You became a doctor because your daddy wouldn't let you go to Julliard. _Julliard_. That must be fun to tell people. _Ah ahlmost wen' ta Juuuliard_. It's probably nearly as much fun as being able to actually say that you went." I wondered too late if I was crossing a line, the pressure to make conversation encouraging me to say whatever entered my head, no matter how callous. Then again, I didn't know why I was supposed to care about upsetting someone whom I knew to be a dick.

"I didn't _have_ to continue onto med school when I graduated. I chose it."

"Hmph."

"I did."

I pursed my lips.

Edward elaborated. "Maybe I didn't like how people saw me. How easy it was for them to believe the worst of me. No one even looked twice at Eric." He glared at his drink. "As if he was so much better than me."

I ignored his attack on Eric. "So you admit that you were an asshole and that that is why people were so ready to believe that you killed Tanya. And you went to med school to improve your image?"

He nodded.

I felt compelled to point out the flaw in his logic. "You should have chosen another career."

"Like what?"

"A firefighter. Everyone likes firefighters. Or a vampire hunter."

He burst out laughing. "A vampire hunter?"

"It's a thing," I defended myself. "Like Dean Winchester." And then, because the solution for babbling is more babbling. "I know what you're thinking."

"I highly doubt that."

"You're thinking _Why Dean and not Sam? Sam's the smart one_. The problem is, I'm smarter than Sam, and since intelligence and boring nicety are Sam's primary attributes, he has nothing to offer. Whereas Dean isn't nice at all and he's a family man and a good fighter. So I can be in charge of the thinking and he will fight demons."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

I wasn't surprised, so I proceeded to make it worse because, as per usual, if I couldn't be charming I could at least provide a spectacle for amusement. "I have a confession. But you can't tell anyone."

"Who would I tell?"

"Jasper. I don't care what he thinks though. And you don't know anyone else I know, so I suppose it doesn't matter." I leaned towards Edward and lowered my voice. "Whenever I find myself falling asleep while translating a particularly hellish piece of German, I imagine that it's really a spell for exorcising a demon or raising a hellhound, and _voila_," I waved a hand in the air, "I'm awake again. It's fucked up, but I am my mother's daughter after all, and she believes in everything."

"And you said that I was crazy."

"I suppose it is a bit odd."

"You don't really believe in all that do you?" he looked a trifle worried.

"I don't worship demons, nor believe in them. But that doesn't mean I'm going to screw around with Ouija boards or start a creepy doll collection. I see no reason to tempt fate."

"That's probably for the best."

"Do you believe in ghosts or demons?"

"No."

"Fantastic. For a minute, I was afraid that you were going to suggest a séance to talk to Tanya's ghost. I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm not doing that."

"Good. That's a relief." Edward ran a hand over his brow as though wiping off the sweat. I didn't know that people still did that. _What a dork_. I shook my head, confused at the image that Edward was presenting. "What are you teaching this semester?" he asked.

"Are you worried about me corrupting the minds of today's youth with talk of the supernatural?"

"You were the one who brought up critical thinking the other day."

"Early Modern Violence and Religion, which isn't so bad because I get to scream _Heretic_ and shake my fist every now and then. And the Industrial Revolution, which is just too steampunk for my tastes. Everything was fine until fucking emo screwed the pooch."

"Is that what your dissertation was about?"

"My dissertation was on the evolution of the Gothic from the Medieval carnivale, and its relationship to outbreaks of violence in the historical narrative. The discursive relationship between the two."

"I don't know what any of that means."

"I don't remember where my spleen is, so I figure we're even. Though I have always wondered, do you think it's true that Jack the Ripper had medical training?"

"I have no idea."

"Oh well. It's fine. Though you know that there's a documentary that says he came to America."

"Is that what you're working on now? I thought you didn't like serial killers. Or was that just cannibals?"

"Hating cannibals is commonsense. At least the cannibals who kill you in order to eat you. Like _Wrong Turn._ The cannibals who eat their loved ones after a natural death as a sign of affection probably aren't that bad. Though, as a vegetarian, I wouldn't want to do that myself, not to mention that it's the source of Kuru." I paused. "Jack the Ripper, per se, isn't my thing. My current project is an attempt at an objective measure of violence in Gothic literature and contemporary non-literary accounts."

"An objective measure of violence?" He sounded weary.

"It's very important," I said, defending myself. "If it's true that Gothic literature was so grotesque, then one would expect a significant increase in the level of violence that it depicted compared to other forms of literature, including the press. And there was certainly competition. The Marquis de Sade, for one. And I haven't gotten much into this part yet, but of course a useful digression would involve looking into the current historiography. I mean, asking why it is that people still care. For instance, why are there still all of these documentaries about Jack the Ripper? Everyone says that Americans are so insulated from violence, but is that true? There's still plenty of violence. Have you seen the statistics on rape or gang violence? Maybe the problem is _who_ the violence is affecting. It's not the voting middle class or the one percent that supposedly run everything. But then there're video games and movies. Maybe people need violence. That's sick but what else are you going to do? And how do you explain modern serial killers? No one talked about serial killers two hundred years ago. But now we're so civilized and insulated from violence, we not only have serial killers, we glorify them. How is that possible? Were there just as many serial killers in the past, but we just didn't recognize them? Or was violence then so much more prevalent throughout society as a whole that someone who might become a serial killer was able to sublimate the violence by becoming a corner butcher? With processed meat and vegetarians, yes I take some of the credit, a guy who needs an outlet can't just stand on the street and watch a cow get sliced and diced. He could still become a doctor, I suppose, but that's not exactly easy."

I took a break from my rant to apologize. "I didn't mean it like that." I didn't think that Edward had become a doctor to express suppressed rage. Not entirely.

"You're probably the only one who _could_ say that to me and not have me think you were accusing me of something." He shook his head. How wrong he was. "But I don't think that there's less violence today. In the ER, I see the results of people doing the worst things to each other every day. There's plenty of violence in society still."

"You're kind of getting a biased sample, don't you think? Think of other countries where there's genocide."

"Those are extreme examples, and maybe I am getting a biased sample, but doctors can't all be serial killers. I know most of my colleagues say that they went into this profession because they wanted to help people, as I keep reminding you."

I snorted.

"What?" he asked, sounding annoyed.

"Doctors are assholes," I repeated.

"You keep saying that, but I haven't heard any evidence to back up the assertion."

"Do you know any doctors who aren't assholes? They're all jerks. I used to think it was the inhumane hours you all work as interns and residents. Or that it was everything you learned about the human body, that it stripped away all of the illusion and broke you. But not one of you would do it if you didn't also want to play God. Otherwise you would have become nurses or physician's assistants. They work the same hours for less pay and get the same dehumanizing training, albeit for fewer years, but they're not assholes."

It was his turn to snort.

"Prove me wrong," I challenged.

"_I_'m not an asshole."

I pursed my lips, thinking it was best if I didn't say what I thought about that.

"I don't _have_ to work in the ER," he said. "I could go somewhere else. I work there because I want to help people."

"Well aren't you Mary fucking Theresa?"

"I _am _Mary fucking Theresa. I hate the ER. I would much rather be in private practice and have a family then work in the ER."

"So do that. Go into private practice and have a family."

"What woman could put up with me?"

"Excellent point. You're doomed." I thought for a minute. ""But really, you don't have to work in the ER. How long does that penance for a crime you didn't even commit last?"

"Maybe it's penance for crimes I did commit," he said gazing at me

I blinked. This discussion was heading in a direction that I didn't like.

I looked at Alice. "Stop ignoring us," I chastised. "We've run out of things to say."

Alice cast a dubious glance in my direction.

"Besides, I thought this was for me to get to know Jasper better," I reminded her.

"What do you want to know?" Jasper asked.

_What do you want with Alice? Why are you pretending to be something you're not?_

At least I knew what Edward wanted from me—someone to enable his obsession with Tanya.

Running interference again, Edward asked Jasper who he thought was going to win Sunday's game. I wasn't sure who was playing in Sunday's game or even what sport was involved so I sat back and sipped on my water.

"You and Edward were getting along very well," Alice observed quietly.

I shrugged, unwilling to say anything one way or another. Did it count as getting along if I was just being polite because it was the civilized thing to do? That seemed rather disingenuous.

"Why is that?" she pressed.

"Do you really want to know?" I asked, a pointless delaying tactic because I knew how she would answer.

"Of course."

"He thinks that I can help him find Tanya's killer."

There was a beat of silence. "That's the stupidest fucking thing that I've ever heard," she snapped, her voice still low so that Jasper and Edward wouldn't overhear.

I was taken aback by the vehemence of her response. For a moment, I was carried away by the drama of the situation, imagining my Lifetime movie again. "If I didn't know you better," I said, "I would think that you'd killed her." It was a ridiculous thing to say.

"You know damn well that I was in Mississippi with my cousins."

"Then what's the problem?" I tried to blow it off.

"The problem is, someone drained all of the blood out of that girl's body. You don't think that sounds like someone you should stay away from?"

"I'm not doing anything dangerous. I'm just sitting in Edward's apartment and looking at lists of suspects."

"His apartment?"

"He calls it a condominium. Instead of rent, he probably pays a mortgage and home owners' association fees, but it seems like the same difference to me."

"Just be careful."

"What the fuck am I going to do? He wants to go talk to people. But I have seen too many horror movies to go down like that. Japanese originals too. No way some _oiwa_ bitch is going to take me out."

"You know that I'm here for you, no matter what," she said.

"Sure sure," I lied. Then I remembered.

"Hey Jasper," I asked, raising my voice so that he could hear me but not so much that my question could be overheard by anyone sitting at the surrounding tables. "Where were you when Tanya died?"

Edward glared at me. _What? He thought I was going to just let this go?_

"I was in Texas," Jasper answered, sounding none too pleased by my choice of topic.

"Texas? What's in Texas?"

"My grandma."

"Oh. You got a ticket stub for that?"

Edward set his beer down on the table a tad more forcefully than I thought necessary.

Okay, perhaps I was a little put out with Alice for making me endure this outing. And perhaps I was slightly angrier over past grievances involving Edward and Jasper than a person entirely at peace with her world ought to be. Because how else could I possibly justify what I did after that?

Rolling my eyes at Edward, I huffed. "Who better to frame you and make me look a liar than our own best friends?"

**AN: Oiwa – a Japanese ghost**

**'**_**I have never been truly accustomed to civil society, where all is worry, obligation, duty, and where my natural independence renders me always incapable of the subjections necessary to whoever wishes to live among men.'**_** - Rousseau**

**'…**_**it is a strange feeling to go about with people who think of nothing but enjoying themselves…They run all day backward and forward in a paradise, without looking about them; and if the neighboring jaws of hell begin to open and to rage, they have recourse to St. Januarius.' **_**- Goethe on Naples**

**"**_**The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real…His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and tomorrow keep him alive…Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie**_**." - Jack London**

**'**_**A corpse without a head…The headless trunk, in shameless posture on the bed, / Naked, in loose abandon lies, / Its secret parts exposed, its treasures all outspread / As if to charm a lover's eyes…Did he at length, that man, his awful thirst too great / For living flesh to satisfy, / On this inert, obedient body consummate / His lust?-O ravished corpse, reply!…I leave you lying as you are, / Mysterious unfortunate. / In vain your lover roves the world; the thought of you / Troubles each chamber where he lies; / Even as you are true to him, he will be true / To you, no doubt, until he dies.**_**' - Baudelaire **

**'**_**Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.**_**' This is Athena who wounds you, Athena who sacrifices and takes vengeance via your wicked blood. – Virgil**

**Rec: "Waterloo" by spanglemaker9: ****I was defeated; you won the war. But how could I ever refuse? I feel like I win when I lose. Bella hates Edward…maybe. Written for The Faithful Shipper's Abba One Shot Contest. AH Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance - Chapters: 5 - Words: 38,135 - Reviews: 614 - Favs: 1,040 - Follows: 246 - Updated:Apr 12, 2012 - Published: Apr 2, 2010 - Bella, Edward - Complete**

**Forgot to say reviewers will find out the name of the book that Edward picked up in Bella's dream!**


	8. Chapter 8

**Thank you to Megs from Bookish Temptations for the recommendation! I ought to have included this last week but am an epic fail *she apologizes mournfully***

**And thank you to SunflowerFran and WonderfullyBedazzled for the recommendations!**

**And thank you to reviewers who have stuck with me from the beginning (and are still sticking with me even when they don't love everything I do) and everyone new who reviewed and added me to their alerts/favorites! You've blown me out of the water!**

**Meyer owns all. Also, I have already admitted that this story was inspired in part by Gillian Flynn's **_**Dark Places, **_**but I swear that I had already decided what to do with Kate before I got to the part in**_** Dark Places**_** about a certain someone in a similar situation. And I'm pissed about it too because I thought I was being so original! *she says while writing ffn***

Chapter 7

'_I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good.' – Robert Louis Stevenson_

BPOV

_Last time on _Gothic, _we left our heroine at a restaurant with her best friend and two gentlemen of less than sterling reputation. Feeling ill at ease in the midst of this company, our heroine naturally responded by making a fool of herself, and to top it all off, proceeded to accuse her best friend and one of the gentlemen in question of setting her up to take the fall with the other gentleman in question for a brutal slaying. _

Unsurprisingly, neither Alice nor Jasper really appreciated the observation that they, as our best friends, were aptly placed for framing Edward and me for Tanya's murder. Alice was used to my lack of regard for the social niceties, and merely rolled her eyes, but Jasper took it less easily in stride.

Which wouldn't have bothered me in the least—I would be more than happy to have finally done or said something to get under the prick's skin—but _I _was not the target of his ire.

It appeared that Jasper had not realized that Edward was looking into Tanya's murder again. Which was stupid. Jasper had clearly invited Edward to that first happy hour with the knowledge that Edward wanted to see me. And what other reason could Edward have for meeting me then the rehashing of events surrounding a certain tragedy? _I_ might have been a little slow on the uptake regarding Edward's motives, but I was not his best friend.

In any case, Jasper was obviously unhappy to learn at present that his friend had resumed the investigation. An investigation that all of Edward's friends and family seemed to have assumed had long ago been laid to rest.

Jasper articulated his concern that Edward was becoming—how should one put it? _obsessive? almost disturbingly possessed? increasingly creepy in his fanatic preoccupation?_—overly fixated on a subject regarding which everyone had decided that Edward could accomplish nothing.

"There isn't anything you can do," Jasper said.

I happened to agree with Jasper, but felt guilty for causing a rift between two friends.

Then I was just confused. Because why should I feel guilty? The rules of etiquette demanded that I attempt to resolve the conflict and apologize for my part in it, but a latent hint of spite suggested that I ought to bask in their discomfort. Was I really that petty?

Yes.

No.

Yes.

I held up a hand. "Jasper, it's not just Edward," I said. "It's me. I'd like to get some closure." I wasn't sure that this was entirely true but Jasper seemed to buy it.

The rest of the evening was somewhat more somber, something for which I realized that I must take responsibility. Did I prefer the fiction of conviviality to the reality of mismatched persons and social classes?

Yes.

No.

Yes.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward had told me where to find Kate Denali. He couldn't talk to her, he said, because that bridge had been burned all the way to the ground, and blasts had been set off to widen the channel of the river. But there was nothing barring me from questioning her.

He was gravely mistaken on this point. Engrained prejudice and the terror of social interaction posed a very significant bar to me questioning Kate Denali. Fortunately, I was able to convince Seth to go with me.

"Why the fuck am I here?" he asked, eyeing the pink neon outline of breasts flashing over the door. The red nipples were a nice touch, I thought, though it was all very ethnocentric.

"You're a guy," I reminded him, dragging him behind me through the door.

"And?"

"You're here for a lap dance."

The music was very loud. And there was a strobe. I hated strobes.

I wasn't very sure how to go about the next steps. Would I recognize Kate?

I doubted it. The women here were very heavily made-up, and nearly all of them were brandishing platinum blond hair that must have come from bottles. Kate had been a natural blonde but she had been fourteen the last time I'd seen her.

"Where should we sit?" I asked Seth.

"Back in my Mini," Seth suggested. He had a hand covering his eyes.

"You're embarrassing me," I hissed, pulling his hand down and pushing him into a seat well enough away from the other patrons. I sat down next to him, balancing on the edge of the squishy seat, trying not to touch anything. Why had I worn a skirt?

"What can I get you?" a waitress asked.

"A Pumpkin Ale," I said, the seriousness of the situation doing nothing to alleviate my need for all things Halloween-related as long as the season was in. With my eyes carefully trained above the waitress's shoulders, I asked, "And um, is Kate working tonight? Kate Denali?"

"You know her?" The waitress scanned me dubiously.

"We went to high school together."

"Whatever, I'll tell her you're here. What about you?" She looked at Seth.

"Anything in a bottle. Just bring the bottle. With the lid still on."

"He's an asshole," I swiftly apologized. "You're an asshole," I told him, to reinforce the lesson, after the waitress rolled her eyes and turned away.

"I'm here as a favor to you. You said 'strip club.' You didn't say 'women's strip club.'"

"You honestly thought I would go with you to a male strip club?"

"If you would just agree to watch _Magic Mike_—"

I deemed it best not to reply, turning my attention to the woman on stage. She was quite acrobatic. Bending my head upside down to follow her contortions, I said, "Did I ever tell you that my stripper name's Liesle?"

"Liesle?" Seth guffawed.

"Yes. And I would have braids and my routine would be to Rasputina's _The Hunter_."

"You are the weirdest person I know."

Coming from Seth, this was a true compliment. Giving him a genuine smile, I thanked him.

"You looking for me?" inquired the strawberry blonde who had appeared with our drinks.

"You're Kate?" I asked, studying her features and trying to recognize her.

"Yep," she smiled, popping the 'p.' "You want a lap dance?"

"How much?" I asked, having already decided that this would be the best way to obtain an opportunity for questioning her.

"A hundred."

I nodded and pushed Seth back in his seat so that there would be sufficient room for Kate to straddle his lap.

"Uh—it's two hundred for him. The hundred's for you, honey."

That was unexpected. "But I—" Seth glared at me. _Fine_. I sat back in the squishy chair. So gross. "Okay." It was really hypocritical of me to ask something of him that I wouldn't be willing to do myself.

She set down the tray and maneuvered herself onto my lap while I tried to determine the pattern of the strobe—pink, blue then green, pink blue then green, then purple, then—

"You can look, you know," Kate said, as she began moving.

My eyes flashed down to her face. "I know. It's not that you're not pretty." I said. "It's me, not you." She was very glossy. And things seemed larger than they ought to have been—bulging at the seams unnaturally. It reminded me of a hot dog sweating on the grill, the rat meat swelling at a different rate than the pig intestine, causing unseemly bulges.

She laughed, taking my hands and putting them on her slightly oily hips. Oh, that wasn't necessary. It wasn't that she was a stripper. It was that _just so many men_ had probably already grasped those slightly oily hips that evening. While I might have manhandled Seth to get him into this place, that was a special occasion and a protective layer of clothing had been involved.

"You don't approve of strippers?" she asked, adding a little hip swivel for emphasis.

It wasn't that. "A job is a job is a job." I wondered if I was expected to do anything special. Like should I have been gyrating back? Participating?

She laughed again, her shiny round breasts bouncing unnaturally in front of my face. I hoped that she wasn't going to try to rub them on my cheeks. "I'm just not you're type?"

I thought for a moment. "I suppose that I'm more of a Juliet Landrau kind of girl."

"Who?"

"From _Buffy_."

"No idea."

"Skeletal brunette." Drusilla was much less intimidating than Kate, except for the fangs, of course. There was just _so much_ of Kate.

"Skinny? Like you? You want to fuck yourself?"

I looked from my relatively flat chest to Kate's decidedly more amply endowed bosom. I wouldn't have said that I was skeletal. Not curvaceous, but not skeletal.

Kate continued. "You must have high self-esteem."

I'd never thought of it that way.

I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. "No pictures," I snapped at Seth.

"You're killing me," he responded.

"Not the face," I insisted. "I'll lose my job."

"You can trust me," Seth promised, clicking away on his phone.

By then the song had come to an end and I hadn't even had a chance to ask my questions. It seemed to me that since Kate had started mid-song, I should at least get the first half of the next song for my money but I was never one to barter and my hands just felt so sticky and I was already wiping them off on my skirt before I realized how rude that probably looked and it wasn't helping anyhow because Kate had been gyrating all over that very skirt with her slick thighs and so the fabric too now bore a fine film of oil. Then I was apologizing for trying to wipe my hands off, as if I thought she wasn't good enough to touch—she was just so damn greasy—and yelling at Seth to pay her while he sat there not helping (he could have found me some napkins) and chuckling at my expense.

Before she could go, I stopped her. "Look I'm sorry. He'll pay you for another dance. But I have some questions I want to ask you."

Kate held her tray in front of her chest like a shield, as if I hadn't already seen her breasts bouncing up close and personal. "About what?"

I sighed, anticipating the discomfort that was sure to come as soon as she heard her sister's name. "Tanya."

She backed up a step. "I don't remember you from school."

"I was a senior when you were a freshman. I was in the same class as Tanya."

"What's your name?"

"Isabella Swan."

Kate dropped the tray and glared. "Oh, fuck you."

"I didn't lie about Edward Cullen," I told her.

"Yeah right."

"I'm telling you that I wouldn't lie for him. He made my life miserable in high school. For the record, so did your sister."

"Then why the fuck do you care what happened to her?"

"Because I'm human." _Look at me_, I thought, _dishing out the platitudes_.

"It happened ten years ago."

"So people are supposed to give up? Don't you think the asshole who killed your sister deserves to go to jail even if ten years have passed?""

She studied me for a minute. "Four hundred. You want me to answer your questions? It'll be four hundred dollars."

_Mother of fuck_. Edward was paying me back for this _and_ for the lap dance. The Purell it was going to take to get my hands clean was _gratis_. "Fine."

Kate sat down—in her own chair—and admitted, after several leading questions, that she didn't know who had killed her sister. That is, if it wasn't that fucker Cullen. There had practically been a revolving door on her sister's bedroom. And who was Cullen to get all high and mighty and break up with Tanya just because she cheated? Like it was such a big surprise.

"Was she only with guys from Forks High?" I asked.

"As if. I think they came from all over. Older guys too. Replacements for daddy. We didn't have what you would call an awesome up-bringing."

It wasn't as if my own up-bringing was anything to write home about. "Anyone in particular? Do you have names?"

She inspected her nails. "I don't know. Newton's father. That guy who ran the grocery store. I swear she fucked the guy from the gas station in the port-a-potty that the construction workers on Main Street were using. Everyone who had any interest at all. She wasn't exactly discerning."

"What about your other sister? Irene. Would she have any suggestions?"

Kate raised an eyebrow. "You want to talk to my sister?" She smiled. "You can talk to my sister."

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Irene Denali was currently residing in _The_ _Wellman's Clinic_. Kate had me added to the visitors' list.

Calling a mental health clinic _Wellman's_ seemed a little fucked up, but who was I to criticize?

I kept my sunglasses on after I walked inside. Easier that way. The place was triggering too many thoughts that I didn't like to have in my head. I probably looked like a prick, but it was all that I could do to make myself ask for Irene and sign the register.

I followed the orderly through a set of doors that we had to be buzzed through, the doors clanging shut behind us and the locks clicking audibly into place. I wondered if I should have brought something for Irene—societal norms dictate the bringing of a gift—but I wondered what I could have possibly brought for someone I'd seen only once or twice in my life. Besides, this wasn't just a hospital where you could bring flowers and crossword puzzles.

I fucking loathed mental health facilities. Either it was in my head or it was an objective fact, but there was a kind of misery about such places—at least there was with this one and the two where they'd put Alice—a dread that hung in the air and crawled inside of me. Not Bedlam perhaps, not cackling madness, but rocking stony-gazed silence and agitated trembling and the sound of weeping, the kind of noise that makes a person want to wrap her arms around her torso in sheer animal fear of whatever thing has caused so much pain. I tried not to look at the people—it would be rude to force yourself upon them in such a state, would it not? To make them watch you watching them? And yet refusing to see them was a kind of rudeness too, wasn't it? Like they weren't good enough to see.

It hurt though. It hurt too much. I hadn't wanted to come.

I'd thought: _Just go. It doesn't mean anything. If you don't go, it'll mean that it means something. And it doesn't._

So I'd gone. And I wished that I hadn't.

Irene was sitting in front of the windows, gazing at the rain. I stood awkwardly in front of her, then took off my sunglasses, feeling like a tool.

"Is it alright if I sit?" I asked.

She didn't reply, so I sat after a moment.

"Do you like the rain?" I wondered, glancing out the window. "It's so peaceful."

"I like the sun," Irene answered softly.

"Oh." I supposed some people _did _prefer the sun. I tried to console her. "It will be sunny again." In Seattle? "Soon."

"I like it when it's sunny and we go outside." She closed her eyes and tipped her face up to the nonexistent sun.

I didn't know what Irene's diagnosis was. Whatever it was, they were still letting people see her. But she was probably monitored at all times. I tried to imagine what that would be like. Locked up in here with so many other people. I bet that she was never allowed off on her own. She probably even had a roommate.

I said, "I met your sister Kate."

Irene looked over my shoulder as if looking for her sister. "Kate's here?"

"No, I'm sorry. She said that I could come see you. She misses you." I assumed that last bit was true.

"She sent you?"

"She did. Kate wanted me to check on you and see how you were doing."

Irene looked back out the window, not replying.

I began to question the purpose of my visit. It would be wrong of me to bring up a topic that might upset her.

"You're Edward Cullen's friend," Irene said slowly.

I wasn't really his friend, but this wasn't the time for semantics. I was surprised that she was even aware of our connection. I highly doubted that she had recognized me. Irene had been no more than twelve when Tanya died. "How did you know?"

"Kate told me you were coming. She calls me sometimes at night."

"That's nice." I didn't know what else to say. I didn't have the courage to ask her anything about the murder.

"You want to know who killed Tanya," she prompted again.

I opened and closed my mouth stupidly. "I want to help her," I said. Irene's prescience was off-putting.

"You can't help her, she's dead."

I didn't like the sound of her voice. So eerily calm. I tried to defend myself, "I think she would want her killer to be found."

Irene's eyes swung back in my direction. "You won't find him. He's gone."

I blinked. "How do you know?" I didn't care for this conversation. Irene's disinterested manner and the general aura of the place were starting to get to me.

"I saw him with her."

"That night? You saw Tanya with the man from the Volvo?" Maybe Tanya and her sisters had met the man earlier in the day and he'd waited until Tanya was alone to pounce.

"He came to visit her every night."

"Every night?" I was confused.

Irene waved a hand through the air. "Like smoke, through the window. Poof."

Oh. I swallowed.

She leaned towards me and lowered her voice. "He changes his face. Like a different man every time." She pulled away again. "All vampires can change shape," she explained.

I didn't know what to say. "I didn't know that," I told her, my voice weak.

She nodded. "It's true. They drink blood, too. He drank all of Tanya's blood. I'm not supposed to have blood they say."

_What?!_

She held a hand to her mouth. "I'm thirsty though, all of the time."

I was frozen in my chair. "Do you—" What the fuck was I supposed to say to that? "Do you want something to drink?"

Her eyes flashed to my face again.

"Water," I said quickly. "I could get you some water."

Irene sighed and turned away. "I suppose so."

I stood up. "I'll be right back," I lied and headed for the exit.

This was above and beyond the call of duty. Far be it from me to call someone out for becoming a stripper or finding herself committed to a mental health institution—apparently against her will—but fuck if I was going to go on the menu myself. Had I not been clear with Edward about my feelings on cannibalism?

I turned down the hallway and shied away from an orderly trying to return a patient to his room. Where the fuck was the exit? Why didn't I pay attention when I was being shown in? Why did I always have to be so fucking unobservant?

I turned around again. I was clearly going the wrong way and the exit was probably on the other side of this uzimaki.

Who the fuck put a mental health clinic in an uzimaki? Was I the only one who watched Japanese horror movies? (And had the sleepless nights to prove it.)

I turned down another empty corridor and hurried past the closed doors, pausing when I came back out into the common room at the end. Irene was still staring out the window. I tried to sneak past her, to the doorway on the opposite side of the room, and was brought up short by a man blocking the way.

I stepped to the side to go around him and he mirrored my movement. Disconcerted, I glanced up at his face and was startled to see him glaring back at me.

"Why are you bothering my daughter?" he demanded.

**AN: **

**REVIEWERS WILL BE REWARDED WITH EXCERPTS FROM BELLA'S DIARY FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE.**

**By the by, I truly appreciate readers sticking with me even though they're like 'Huh.' And for the record, I've had to look up more than one of the things that y'all have written in your reviews (I think some of you are testing me). But I enjoy reading things that are random/weird/confusing/surreal. I enjoy not knowing what's going on sometimes. It's like weed without the danger of being arrested—oh wait, I guess that's not an issue anymore. In any case, perhaps I should start including a "Random digression warning" at the top of every chapter… **

_**Uzimaki**_** translates to 'spiral' or something like that, according to the subtitles of the Japanese horror movie by that name. There's something very kitschy creepy about the film—like Nimoy's **_**In Search Of**_**. If you are going to watch this or any other foreign film, horror or not, do not—I mean it—**_**do not**_** use dubbing. **_**Always**_** watch with subtitles. No exceptions. You watch with dubbing, I don't want to hear about how you think it sucked. However, I must say, it's surreal/weird/random. You won't know what's going on. So if you don't like that, don't watch. If you do…be warned that I stopped eating cinnamon toast for a while after I saw this movie because of the swirls the cinnamon made in the bread. **

**Rec: Saturday Night Fever by RebeccaSwanCullen **While everyone else in their group gets along just fine, Edward and Bella simply seem to hate each other. The question is, is there more behind their supposed animosity? And what will they do once they acknowledge that fact? AU/AH.


	9. Chapter 9

**Thank you to the International House of Fanfic (Ficsters dot com) for the glowing review!**

**Another thanks to cjesmom and Tarbecca for the recs! They are much appreciated!**

**Posting early in light of a certain holiday happening this week in the States!**

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 8

'_While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped _

_Thro' many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin_

_And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing_

_Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.'_

_Percy B. Shelley_

BPOV

_Last time on _Gothic_, our heroine was attempting to take her leave of one of sisters of the dearly departed Tanya Denali when her escape was arrested by the father of said deceased. He did not seem to take it at all kindly that our heroine was discovered visiting his daughter, a young woman whose demeanor, it must be confessed, seemed slightly more morbid than is expected of the general public. _

Aro Denali stepped threateningly towards me. "Why are you here?" he asked.

I took a step back and glanced around. There were a few orderlies busy with patients. We weren't really alone. He couldn't do anything to me.

I glanced back at him and cringed. Even before Tanya had died, I'd been frightened of Aro—of Mr. Denali, all these years later, I still thought of him as Mr. Denali, Tanya's father. There was just something about him that I had never liked. Charlie had had him over for poker one night when I was fifteen or sixteen. Making nice with the locals or something. Mr. Denali was a harmless small-town lawyer. Sleazy, maybe, but not a criminal. Right? At least, not until after Tanya died.

_I'll do to you what he did to her_, I remembered him screaming at me as he pounded on the front door of Charlie's house after my statement to the police got Edward released. It had taken Charlie ten minutes to get home and drag Mr. Denali away. Ten minutes that I'd spent in the kitchen on the floor with a butcher knife in my hands.

"I remember you," Mr. Denali snarled at me in the common room of his daughter's psychiatric clinic. His cheap suit did little to improve his appearance, the features of his face twisted with rage. The years had not been kind. He had the look of an alcoholic. He had and his daughters had moved away from Forks nine years ago.

"I'm trying to help," I tried to explain idiotically. But who was I really helping? Edward Cullen—the very man that Aro Denali blamed for his daughter's death.

"I don't know what that whore daughter of mine was thinking when she had you added to the visitors' list, but you're off of it now."

He advanced another step towards me, his hands closing into fists. I stumbled back and his eyes glittered as if he was contemplating some foul deed.

"I'm sorry," I apologized, attempting to placate him. "I didn't lie about Ed—"

"Do _not_ say that bastard's name in my presence!" Mr. Denali shouted.

That finally got some attention, as I spied an orderly approaching.

"I'll just go." I tried to edge my way around Mr. Denali.

"Is there a problem here?" the orderly asked.

"No, no problem," I replied, wanting to get away as fast as possible.

"Yes, there's a problem. This woman hasn't got any right to be here. I want her arrested."

Arrested?

"Sir—"  
>"I'm going," I broke in, "I'll just go."<p>

Our argument seemed to be disrupting some of the patients. Irene was staring at us blankly, but the fellow in the corner had started rocking more furiously and a few of the others were casting dubious glances in our direction.

"You can't go," a man by the window said. "You can't ever go."

The orderly was reasoning with Mr. Denali, apparently having overheard most of our exchange. "If she was on your daughter's visitors' list then I'm afraid that we can't have her arrested. But you've taken her off the list now. So let's just let her go, and she won't come back."

"If you think that I'm going to let her off that easily," Mr. Denali reached for me and I jumped out of the way.

The orderly grabbed Mr. Denali's arm and pulled him back. "You're going to upset the patients."

Mr. Denali threw a punch at the orderly and the man rocking in the corner began wailing. I turned and fled in the direction from which Mr. Denali had come, not pausing to see if anyone was following until I reached the desk by the exit.

"You can't run in here," the woman at the counter snapped.

"Let me out, please," I begged.

"Calm down," she hissed.

I stood with my hand on the door, gazing worriedly back over my shoulder at the empty hallway from which I could still hear the wails of patients, with my muscles tensed for a fight.

The buzzer sounded and I shoved at the door.

"Don't slam the door!" the woman yelled.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I met Edward in the cafeteria of the hospital a few nights later to tell him about the Denalis.

His knee bounced uneasily throughout it all.

"They didn't give you any names?" he asked.

"Nothing."

He sighed. "Well, I never heard this nonsense about a vampire before, but it's not surprising, what with how Tanya died and Irene's mental state."

I almost asked if he thought Irene really drank blood, and if so, did she have porphyria, which seemed unlikely given her love of the sun, but that was just my morbid penchant for the gothic at work, and also suggested a shocking dearth of empathy. The rules compel a show of compassion.

Instead, I asked him about what Kate had said, reasoning that this was at least related to our so-called investigation. "Did you know that Tanya—" I broke off.

"Slept around that much?"

I nodded.

Edward grimaced. "I knew she wasn't a saint, but I didn't realize it was that bad. I thought it was just the guys in our class."

I wondered if he'd had himself tested for STDs, but of course he would have. Ten years had passed. It was morbid curiosity on my part again—or faux concern stemming from this fiction of friendship that had grown between us. It was none of my business. I asked, "How is it that none of this came out during the police investigation?"

Edward shrugged. "Some of it did. At least the part about Mike and some of the other guys in our class. But they all had their bullshit alibi because of that party at First Beach. I think Lauren and Jessica must have known more. They were probably trying to protect Tanya's reputation."

"Hmph."

"What?"

"I didn't say anything."

Edward eyed me suspiciously but let it go. "We'll need to get a list of everyone though. Make sure that we really know who had a motive. I just don't understand how Tanya could have hidden all of this from me. And now Kate's stripping. She was such a sweet kid. How the fuck does something like that happen?"

"What do you mean?"

"There is clearly something seriously wrong going on in that family. I knew that their mother's death was pretty rough and that Tanya never got along with her father. But what the fuck?"

Tanya's proclivity for sleeping around was, I supposed, questionable, at least from the perspective of public health, though I wasn't sure that I had a right to judge. And Irene seemed a little outré, but perhaps she just had an iron deficiency. Kate seemed fine to me. "What's wrong with stripping?"

Edward looked shocked. "Isn't it a violation of the feminist bill of rights?"

"If a man is stupid enough to give a woman money for taking off her clothes then good for her."

Edward shook his head. "I'm having trouble believing that you're really okay with that."

"It's not something that _I_ am going to do." I shrugged. "A man would probably be more likely to pay me to put my clothes back on. I know that other feminists would disagree with me. But I think feminism is about supporting women's choices—even ones that you think are stupid. Personally, I didn't like the—" I held up my hands, "—touching. So oily." I shuddered. "But I'm not a guy. Maybe they like it."

"You _touched _Kate?"

"She gave me a lap dance."

"_What?!_"

"I thought that was what I was supposed to do," I defended myself, feeling the blood rush to my face. "I brought Seth, but she said that he was more expensive, so I had the lap dance instead. You owe me, by the way, not just the money for the lap dance and the money that she wanted in exchange for answering my questions, but for saving you money by getting the lap dance myself instead of making Seth get it." I crinkled my nose. "Though I suppose that I could have just skipped the lap dance and asked my questions. But maybe she was only allowed to sit with us because she'd already given me a lap dance." I gave up. "I don't know about things like that."

Edward gaped at me.

I changed the subject, uncomfortable with the current topic. "Tell me again why you think Eric did it." To be fair, I _was_ concerned about Edward's suspicions on this point.

Edward's demeanor changed instantly, his shoulders stiffening. "He was a freak."

Asshole. "I was a freak."

"You have an alibi. You were watching me in the woods," Edward smirked.

"I wasn't _watching_ you. And what is it that they always say about serial killers? _He was so nice. I never would have imagined he could do something like that_. Now _I _never would have said that you were nice or likeable, but you had a lot of friends who presumably would have. So a popular guy like you is a far more likely suspect. Or Mike."

"Oh, that fucker's on my list too."

"Funny how everyone is on your list except for the people who we happen to know for a fact got a sick pleasure out of making others suffer."

Edward opened his mouth to reply, but fortunately his pager went off, effectively cutting him off. "I've got to go," he said.

I smiled sweetly. "Have fun slicing and dicing."

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

That night, I googled Eric Yorkie. I didn't often google people. Doing so would imply that I cared what they were doing. Of course, Edward had a whole sheaf of information as to Eric's activities over the last ten years, but I didn't want to raise his suspicions by asking to see it again.

I was surprised by the number of hits that popped up. Eric, it seemed, was a frequent contributor to video game—or was it card game?—websites. I found a few reviews that he'd written, and appreciated his use of grammar. Finding him listed as an employee on the website for a local shop called _The Game_, it occurred to me that Eric wouldn't mind seeing me again. We shared a kind of kinship, didn't we? Forged by our shared experiences in the hell that was high school.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

"Fuck that," Eric snapped, clearly not giving a shit if he was overheard by the two patrons currently thumbing through comic books on the far side of the store.

Eric was in the midst of stocking a shelf of _Firefly _figurines when I came in. _The Game_ was a fairly tiny shop, nestled amongst the less frequented byways of a recession-laden outer suburb whose populace didn't seem to have the cash to fund hobbies. There was grime on the windows and dust on the shelves. I wondered how the shop managed to stay open.

I conceded the awkwardness of the conversation at hand. "I know Tanya's death was upsetting but—"

"Are you fucking kidding me? I hated that bitch."

Didn't he know that we were supposed to have gotten past all of that? "Still, shouldn't we try to find out who killed her?"

"Why? The only thing I regret is that it didn't happen sooner."

_The shooter was a freak_, I remembered hearing recently on the radio after a school shooting on the other side of the country. _He _deserved_ to be ostracized._ It was a tautology: The shooter was a freak so he deserved to be ostracized so he was ostracized so he was a freak. Being a teacher now, I knew that I couldn't afford to be complacent. But I also knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of such degrading treatment, treatment that was itself a kind of violence, but one that would be tolerated until the victim lashed back.

Eric wasn't done though. "Whoever he was, he could have taken out the whole clique for all I care."

"Who do you think it was?" I asked.

"Cullen," Eric answered with an angry shrug.

"But I know it wasn't him."

Eric sneered at me. "Yeah right."

"I _saw _him."

"And you just had to run and tell the cops, didn't you?"

"I couldn't let an innocent person go to jail."

"Why not? Do you have _any_ idea what they put me through?"

I didn't know what to say. Of course I had an idea what they'd put him through. They'd done the same things to me.

Eric ran his eyes over me. "Look at you," he said. "Just like them now. Think you're too good for the rest of us."

_What?_ I was dressed for work, in black slacks and a tailored top, but that didn't mean anything. "I haven't changed," I said. If he thought that I was bad, he would _loathe_ Alice.

"Please. Look at me."

I looked at Eric. He was wearing a t-shirt with a reference I didn't understand and black jeans. He looked fine to me. "You look the same," I told him.

"Exactly. I'm not running around kissing up to assholes who used to treat me like shit and dressing like someone else. I'm not the one defending the very people who wouldn't bother to piss on me after they finished setting me on fire."

"But all that's done. That was in the past."

"You honestly think that they would treat you like a human being if you bumped into them today?"

I hadn't told Eric the true reason for my interest in Tanya's death. I'd left out Edward's name entirely. For all Eric knew, I was doing this for myself.

Consequently, Eric had zero reason to think that his old nemeses were capable of change. How could I blame him? I didn't really think they were capable of change myself.

I didn't want to ask, but I had to. "You _were_ on the beach that night, weren't you?"

"Yes I was on the fucking beach. You want to know how I remember?" He pulled up his t-shirt, showing me a long scar across his stomach. "It was the worst night of my fucking life."

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they'd done much worse things to Eric than they'd ever done to me.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Four nights later, I buzzed Edward's apartment at exactly six o'clock. I had decided not to tell him about Eric, not wanting to fuel Edward's obsession for a guy who'd been bullied so badly that he hadn't even pressed charges when he was stabbed because he knew that no one would back up his version of events.

My decision to say nothing to Edward about seeing Eric had received unexpected justification when I tried talking to Jasper about the murder in the faculty lounge that afternoon. Jasper had snapped at me, saying that this crusade of Edward's was out of control, that Edward needed help and that I shouldn't be encouraging him. I got the sense that there was more to the story than what I was hearing. It wasn't as if this—whatever it was—had completely disrupted Edward's life. He was a doctor, which ought to have required some demonstration of competency, and I'd no doubt that he was just as much the life of the party as ever.

The look on Jasper's face told me that maybe I was wrong, but I also remembered the look on Eric's face when I left the shop. A look that Edward and Jasper had had no small part in putting there, even if they weren't present the night that Eric was stabbed. How could I reconcile the Jasper and Edward that I knew ten years ago with the men they seemed to be now? I was confused, to say the least.

"Can I get you anything?" Edward asked after letting me up, stepping out of the way for me to enter his not so humble abode.

"I'm good." I was still resolved to see this through. But it wouldn't behoove me to forget everything Edward had once done. Recent good behavior aside, he was no doubt incapable of sustained civilized interaction. I would endeavor to stay on his good side, following the path of least resistance and pretending that I didn't know what kind of a person he really was.

"Did you eat yet? Because we could have dinner and then go."

"Already ate. But if you want something—" I trailed off, quite proud of myself,feigning a conscientious concern for his well-being.

"Fast food's fine," Edward said as he slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and followed me back out into the hall. "So I think we should take my car," he said as we waited for the elevator.

"We're riding together?" I asked.

"Why not? It only makes sense."

It might make sense from a fuel economy perspective, but it was hardly in line with the restriction of social interaction.

"We can take my truck," I told him.

"No. I saw your truck in the parking lot of Giana's. It's the same truck you drove in high school."

"What's wrong with that?"

"It's also the same truck that your grandfather drove to high school," Edward observed.

"Not true. And even if it were, that just goes to show the beauty of American craftsmanship."

"It'll take three times as many tanks of gas to get to Forks as my Porsche."

"A Porsche? You're seriously going to call out my truck when you drive a Porsche?"

"What's wrong with a Porsche?"

There were many things. My middle class skin would probably break out in hives just from sitting in the thing. But I remembered that I was trying to be nice.

Edward seemed to take my silence as a challenge. "It's very safe," he defended himself.

"You are the one I remember getting all of the traffic tickets in high school. If anyone needs protection, it's everyone else."

We took his Porsche.

The next argument involved who was going to drive.

"You just got off of work," I reminded him. "And when did you go on shift?"

"Last night at seven, but I'm fine."

"Not a chance. Give me the keys. I promise not to roll your shiny Porsche over. Wouldn't want you to have to buy a new one and improve their sales."

He handed me the keys.

The next argument involved the musical selection best-suited to ensure our listening pleasure during our journey.

"Driver's choice," I said. "Everyone knows that." _Everyone_ did know that. I might have been trying to follow the path of least resistance, but that didn't mean that I was going to put up with his bullshit.

"What the hell is this?" Edward asked.

_Oh, did he not like my music?_ Funny how that seemed to fill me with a teeny tiny sense of delight. I may have begun bobbing my head a bit more enthusiastically. "You're supposed to be asleep," I reminded him.

"I can't sleep through this."

I started shaking the hand that wasn't on the steering wheel like I was rattling a maraca. "It _is _pretty awesome," I admitted before I began singing along. "_Antique high heel red doll shoes_." I sobered. "What _Mister, I am a musical savant_, you don't like _Rasputina_?"

"I don't think this is music."

"I thought that you liked Classical. How do you not like a band made up of women playing the cello and named after Rasputin?"

"I don't hear any cellos in there."

"There _are_ cellos. Maybe not in this particular song, but elsewhere. As for your claims to musical sophistication, I say _ha!_ Ha!"

"Don't _ha!_ me. This is crap." Edward then tried to ban _Rasputina _from the car entirely. "My hair is literally standing up on the back of my neck. This is the creepiest song I've ever heard."

"I know, isn't it fantastic?" I trilled.

"No. No songs about dolls and black masses."

"What do _you_ consider Goth? _Marilyn Manson?_ Please. I bet you only like poppy, easy listening boring crap. I bet there's no real Goth on your mp3 player anywhere."

"Mp3 player? It'd called an iPod. And I'm not sure that Goth has any redeeming values."

"No redeeming values?! You mean other than the singular articulation of the sublime and the surreal in a maelstrom of played out cliché and trite emotions? Stuff that doesn't get played on the radio because the radio's for sheep. And FYI, Mr. Elitist, cheapskates like me don't use iPods. We buy mp3 players."

"Maybe it doesn't get played because it's crap."

"How is_ Ke$ha _not crap?"

Fast forward an hour, by which point we had moved onto other genres: "My _Fancy Pants_ ragtime Pandora station is the shit," I repeated for at least the third time.

"But you didn't pick the music on that station," Edward huffed, as if that was a valid criticism.

"What do you mean, I didn't pick the music? It's _geared_ to my musical tastes. I thumb things up and down and it learns what I like and gives me more stuff that I'll like. It's driven by what I want to listen to. Not like corporate sponsored radio that plays the same ten songs over and over again."

"I don't trust Pandora's algorithms. I want to see them for myself."

"Well, my station is awesome. In fact, all of my stations are awesome. This one is just the best."

"Are you just saying that because you like that it's called _Fancy Pants_?"

"N-no." I kind of did.

"Did you even know that there was a ragtime song called _Fancy Pants _before you heard it on Pandora?"

"That isn't the point. The point is that _I _like ragtime. And no one else likes ragtime. I was just sitting there one day, a little girl, watching _Alvin and the Chipmunks_, and the Chipette's foster mother started playing a song on the piano, and it was quite probably the greatest piano flourishings that I had ever heard, and I asked my grandmother _What is that noise? _and my grandmother, Buddha rest her soul, said it was ragtime, and I knew that I loved it."

"I play ragtime," Edward smirked.

I glanced quickly at him. "No you don't."

"I do. On my piano. It's my favorite."

"You're lying. There's no piano in your apartment."

"It's in the den."

"We were in the den," I reminded him.

"No, we were in the parlor."

I snapped my mouth shut and glared at the highway before us. _Who has a parlor anymore?_

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward and I were going to spend the night in a bed and breakfast in Port Angeles. Edward had made the reservations. We had both agreed that one night spent with our respective families that weekend was going to be more than enough.

It was pretty late when we pulled up to the bed and breakfast. I was happy they could accommodate such a late check-in.

"I put Mr. Cullen in the blue room," Mr. Crowley said, shuffling slowly up the stairs. I cocked an eyebrow at the décor and glanced at Edward who grinned back at me. Daguerreotypes and tinted sketches covered the red walls.

"I thought you would like it," Edward said.

"Yeah," I replied flatly. While it was true that I liked to _imagine_ that I lived in the eighteenth century, I didn't actually want to _live_ in the eighteenth century. Who knew a place like this was hiding in Port Angeles? I hoped that there was indoor plumbing.

Mr. Crowley led the way across the landing and opened a door into a very blue room.

"Wow," Edward marveled. "This is really blue." And it was. Aqua turquoise and periwinkle and robin's egg and every other color of the blue spectrum.

I gave Edward a withering glance.

"I like blue," he defended himself.

"And the red room for Miss Swan," Mr. Crowley said, opening the next door along the hallway.

"It's very red," I agreed.

"You're lucky to get it too," Mr. Crowley confided. "It's usually the room that goes first, and we're booked up solid you know."

"I'm sure red's very popular," I commented.

"It's mostly the ghosts I think," Mr. Crowley replied, his eyes darting to the corners of the so-called red room.

"The ghosts?"

"Oh yes, we're the most haunted bed and breakfast in Port Angeles."

_That was a thing?_

"We hold séances in this very room once a month," Mr. Crowley went on.

"That must bring in a lot of guests," Edward said conversationally.

Mr. Crowley smiled indulgently. "Yes, our ghosts are a lively bunch," he said before wishing us a good night and departing.

Edward walked over and knocked on the wall next to my bed. "Show yourself." _What the fuck?_ He looked around. "If you're really here, why don't you say something? Do something so that we know you're with us."

"What the hell is wrong with you?" I spit.

He laughed at me. "Oh come on. Don't tell me that you buy this."

"I _don't _buy it," I huffed, throwing my duffel down.

"Seriously?"

"I _told _you that I don't believe in the supernatural."

"If you don't believe then what's the harm in a little table rapping?"

"Do that shit in your own room!"

"How can someone who reads horror all day be scared of ghosts?"

"I'm not fucking scared." I crossed my arms and glared at the mirror in the corner, the patina on the glass distorting my face grossly. Sometimes people read horror and watch horror movies because they are trying not to be afraid.

And it doesn't always work.

Acting as if he thought that I needed reassurance, Edward explained. "The human mind finds patterns in the patternless. It's what distinguishes us from monkeys. That's all it is." Like I didn't fucking know that already.

"Yeah well I have no interest in testing that. I say leave the unknown to the unknown."

Edward must have been more exhausted than I'd realized, because he started babbling. "There is no 'unknown' to leave it to because there's nothing to know." He came and stood in front of me. "Really, what's the worst that could happen?"

I shrugged. _My soul. Carted. Off. To. Hell._ Not that I believed in hell because I was an atheist, but if Pascal's wager justified belief in God then it definitely justified at least considering the possibility of a devil.

And I knew just what would be waiting for me in hell, too. The results if not the physical conditions of the _Roiling Abyss_ and the _Mountains of Madness_ on spin cycle. Dali on overdrive. Skin bare and melted, no boundaries, things untouched touched, one long scream that wasn't a scream because no scream could ever express that much sheer terror. No possibility of habituation.

There was nothing scarier than realizing that you were going crazy. And that's just what a paranormal experience would boil down to. Proof that I was insane. They'd lock me up next to Irene.

And for all my postering, someone who studied horror couldn't help believing, at least a little bit, that there might be something to it. Especially not with a mother like mine.

"You okay Bella?" Edward asked.

"I'm fine." I was still glaring at my face in the mirror, made so ugly by the distortion. I could see the side of Edward's face in the glass, and he wasn't looking very pretty either. Dali already getting his freak on.

Wanting to make sure that it was just a trick of the light, I turned to look at the real thing, and saw what looked like contrition in Edward's features.

He apologized. "I didn't know anything about this ghost stuff when I booked the rooms. I just thought it would be a nice way to thank you for helping me. You know, a slice of history."

"It's real historical."

"You want to switch rooms?"

_And let Edward think that I was the victim of superstitious fancies?_ Ha! "Why would I want to do that?" I looked around. "It _is_ very red," I said, deciding to focus on something somewhat more rational than the undead, "and I don't really like the color red, because it's so _red_. I'm more of a green person. Soothing. But there's no reason I can't sleep in a red room."

An hour later, I was sitting on top of the red covers on the cherry red bed in that very red room, the red walls of which were hung with more black and white daguerreotypes of the long since dead, in my flannel pajamas, clutching my cell phone with all of the lights blazing, a red sheet thrown over the mirror so that I could not see the way the red light reflected in swirls from the glass. The first peal of thunder sounded.

That was alright. I liked the rain. Loved it.

_Nothing better than a cozy storm._

…until the lights go out leaving you alone with the ghosts that you don't believe in.

A beat after the darkness descended, I was out of the door, standing in the hallway, beating on Edward's door, with the light of my phone casting a meager blue gleam around my face.

"Are you okay?" he asked when he opened the door, stepping aside to let me in.

"I'm fine," I told him, quickly raising my eyes from his chest, which I had noticed was bare. "I was just making sure that you were okay." At least he was wearing boxers.

"Why wouldn't I be okay?"

"I don't know. Maybe you needed a light. Because maybe you wouldn't be able to find your cell phone in the dark and you might hurt yourself looking for it." To demonstrate my usefulness, I fiddled with my phone until the flashlight function came on. "See?" I shined it directly in Edward's eyes and he stumbled back a step, holding up a hand. I shined the light around the room. "Ah, there it is," I said, marching over to the night stand. "Your cell phone." I picked it up and flourished it in the air.

"Thanks," Edward took it from me.

There was a beat of silence. "So now that you have your cell phone, I'll just go back to my room." I turned towards the door.

"The electricity's off," Edward noted.

"Mmm hmm." I didn't bother to point out that he seemed to be a little slow on the uptake. Maybe he was still groggy.

"The heating looks pretty modern. Electric."

"It is?"

He nodded. "And if the electric's gone, it's going to get pretty cold."

"It's only October. It probably won't get that cold," I argued.

"But no reason to chance it."

"We could put on more clothes," I suggested. Of course he would have to put more clothes on than me, as he was currently wearing so little.

"We should probably also stay together, too. Conserve heat."

"I don't think that really works."

"It totally works." I noticed that Edward had reverted to his high school patois. Another sign of exhaustion. Maybe I was exhausted too. That would explain my childish behavior.

"No. I think it's an old wives tale."

"I'm a doctor. I know about these things."

I turned around and looked at the very blue bed. The blankets were all rumpled. The sheets were also blue. "There's only one bed."

"It's a big bed."

"I'm a kicker," I warned.

"I think I can take you."

**AN: REVIEWERS REWARDED WITH OUTTAKE FROM ALICE'S FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE!**

**Rec: Seventeen Minutes by queenofthenile91 - **Seventeen minutes will now be forever known as the Forks High School Massacre. It only took seventeen minutes for a lone gunman to kill eleven students and two staff members as well as leave numerous others injured. It was only seventeen minutes, but its survivors have scars that will last a lifetime. Twilight - Rated: M - English - Hurt/Comfort/Drama - Chapters: 43 - Words: 153,686 - Reviews: 538 - Favs: 397 - Follows: 260 - - Complete

**If you're wondering why Bella's still hung up about something that happened ten years ago, check out queenofthenile91's story. She's got tons of facts and figures on the problem of bullying.**


	10. Chapter 10

**18Dec2014 – if you started reading on or after this date, you knew this was coming. **

**Otherwise, some explanation is called for: It occurred to me that a real gothic serial would be appearing in a newspaper or magazine in the midst of news articles and advertisements. And who am I to deny the people their slice of authenticity?**

**Meyers owns all.**

**FANFIC TIMES**

_All the news that the others won't print_

Letter to the Editor

Anonymous

The readers of _Fanfic Times _cannot have helped but to notice the recent addition to its pages of a certain fictional tale which is more than a little evocative of that seedy genre known as Gothic literature. While we applaud this paper's continued support of the arts, we must voice our concerns over the ghoulish nature of the story in question.

Consider the protagonist of this piece: One Isabella Marie Swan (Izzy, to her bullies). To the unassuming, she is like any other run-of-the-mill Bella. But probe more deeply, and you will find that she exhibits signs of antisocial behavior which, to modern mainstream sensibilities, is entirely inappropriate. Among other things, Bella exhibits a marked unwillingness to discuss matters in which we are most interested. This is rude and discourages the development of any friendly feelings to which we might be inclined. Doesn't she want us to like her? Bellas in other fanfics (_Hit by Destiny_ for instance) suffer far more serious childhood trauma (which is described in delightfully excruciating detail) and yet they come out sweet and gentle. This Bella seems to take it personally that no one likes her. Why should they? She's mean.

Whatever justification this Bella might have for her indifference and hostility is unfairly kept from the reader by Bella's unwillingness to come clean about her past, specifically about just what went down in high school. Bella asserts that such details are not interesting. But we beg to differ. This is the very thing we want most to know. It is all well and good to ask a person to wait until the end of a story to find out the name of a killer, but there is no reason that we should have to wait to find out anything about how Bella ticks. Isn't she the one telling the story? Can't she just tell us? Repression _is_ suggestive of trauma, but we think that we should be the judges of whether or not the events in question were truly traumatic. Art, after all, is suffering. And Bella's the one who reads the Marquis de Sade. Who is she to scold us?

We propose that the following course of action be immediately carried out (in the story, that is): Bella is to confront Edward with the details of their shared history (discussing these details at great length), secure his apology, and work with him to resolve any lingering hostility posthaste. That such a confrontation at this stage of their relationship would be unlikely to happen in real life—because a person suffering anxiety is unlikely to confront anything head-on and because all of the evidence that Bella's collected up to this point on one Edward Cullen suggests that no such action on her part would actually produce an apology from him and because apologies are just words that mean nothing—is hardly an impediment to the satisfaction of the readers' desires on this point.

We believe that our proposal is key to the emergence of a kinder, gentler Bella. A Bella who doesn't listen to _Rasputina_. We would very much like to read about _that _Bella solving the mystery of who killed that whore Tanya. And we would be more concerned for her well-being when a dead animal showed up on her doorstep too. As of right now, we kind of think she deserves it.

In conclusion, a change of genre is in order. Gothic literature is morbid and depressing. However, delectable exposés of a heroine's suffering, followed by her romantic triumph, now _that_ is something we can get on board with.

We hope that you will voice your opinion in agreeing with our proposal to change the genre of this story to rom-com. Allowing the tale to proceed along its current trajectory is tantamount to suggesting that deviants have a right to their way of life. We would very much prefer that they be just like us instead.

**-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-**

**Just who IS Bella Swan?**

What secrets lurk beneath the surface?

When will she confront Edward with the truth of his crimes?

When will she realize that her fucking life is in danger?

**Finding the killer is only the **_**first **_**mystery…**

**Read "Gothic" by author-self-insert**

**-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-**

**Murder of Local Girl Still Unsolved**

By Ambrose Bierce

A decade after the brutal slaying of a local girl, police are still baffled. Tanya Denali was pretty, well-liked, and headed for college. She had everything going for her until she disappeared one afternoon in a silver Volvo. Now, in an attempt to bring her killer to justice, we have appealed to the public for any theories they might have. Here is what they have to say about the list of suspects, followed by a timeline of the murder:

**Edward**

Alibi – Bella saw him in the woods at the time of the murder

Motive – Tanya had just cheated on him

**Jasper**, Edward's friend

Alibi – was supposedly in Texas at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

Votes:

- Yay: Capricorn75 "Jasper did it! Okay, no reason for saying that, I'm just naming my suspect early on. Calling shotgun, if you will." Nov19

- Nay: Cared "I don't suspect Jasper or Alice" 18Nov

**Alice**

Alibi – was supposedly in Mississippi at the time of the murder

Motive – Tanya and Edward led the brat pack who made Alice's high school years such a torment

Votes:

- Yay: Guest on 14Nov

- Nay: Cared "I don't suspect Jasper or Alice" 18Nov

**Bella**

Alibi – Saw Edward in the woods at the time of the murder (…but no one saw her, did they?)

Motive – 1. Tanya and Edward led the brat pack who made Bella's high school years such a torment. 2. Plot to destroy Edward's traitorous girlfriend and swoop in to save Edward from prosecution, all in a desperate gamble to make Edward like her (really? desperate much!)

- Yay: I remember someone saying that they suspected her but couldn't find the review when I went back through them

**Mike** **Newton**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

**Jessica**, Tanya's friend

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

**Lauren**, Tanya's friend

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

**Eric**

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive – Tanya and Edward led the brat pack who made Eric's high school years such a torment.

**James**, Edward and Jasper's friend

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive – Does he need one? Everyone hates James. Except, of course, the people who flip the script and make him the hero of their ffn.

Votes:

- Yay: Angelari7 "James maybe?" 31Oct, cejsmom "my money is on James" 19Nov, 2brown-eyes "possible foreshadowing…James perhaps?" 18Nov, GorGirl "I bet it was James" 25Nov

**Felix Manning**, had sex with Tanya, mechanic at the place where Tanya's father took his cars

Alibi – ?

Motive – ?

**Demitri Giampetroni**, had sex with Tanya, brother of waitress who is the last person to see Tanya alive

Alibi – ?

Motive – ?

**Carlisle**

Alibi – Was in Seattle at the time of the murder with his wife (of course, you will recall that spouses can't be compelled to testify…)

Motive – Was he one of the men that Tanya was having an affair with?

Votes:

- Yay: LRK860 "You have me wondering about Carlisle. Didn't Edward say his parents wanted him to date Tanya, why? Small town gossip surely would have zoomed in on her at some point. Or a good visit to the good doctor because of an STD scare." 20Nov

**Mike Newton's father**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – ?

Motive – Didn't want anyone to know that he was having sex with Tanya

**Grocery store manager**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – ?

Motive – Didn't want anyone to know that he was having sex with Tanya

**Gas station attendant**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – ?

Motive – Didn't want anyone to know that he was having sex with Tanya

**Aro Denali**

Alibi – ?

Motive – Psycho (poor Tanya)

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "Her sisters knew an awful lot about her sexual exploits, what about Daddy? How long were the girls sitting in the coffee shop, who came to get them" 20Nov, CindyWindy1 "Mr. Denali makes a fine suspect. Acting unhinged and irrationally angry now, and in the past he threatened to horrifically murder high school aged Bella." 27Nov

**Unknown serial killer**

Alibi - ?

Motive – Psycho serial killer who just happened to have short red hair and drive a car that looked like Edward's

**Someone from La Push**, it wouldn't be fair to leave them out

Alibi – Just about everyone was at First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive – 1. Maybe Tanya found that pirate gold that's supposed to be buried in La Push (yes, I was serious about this. If _Oak Island_ can have its own show, then I can have pirate gold at La Push). 2. Needed to hide fact that they'd had sex with Tanya.

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "What about the boys on the reservation? Who did she sleep with from there?" 20Nov

**Police**, maybe just some of them or all of them (ugh?)

Alibi – ?

Motive – They were having sex with Tanya

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "WHY didn't the police investigate further, did Tanya sleep with some of them?" 20Nov

**Wives and girlfriends of everyone who Tanya had sex with**

Alibi – ?

Motive – They were having sex with her

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "I've got no clue where to begin to whittle down possible suspects who wanted Tanya dead. Lots of wives and girlfriends, for sure." 20Nov (yes this is the same guest who cast the other votes noted for this day – he/she was ON FIRE!)

**Vampire**, seen by Irene going in and out of Tanya's room

Alibi – Vampires don't exist (supposedly)

Motive – An insatiable thirst for life-blood

Votes:

- Yay: Roxiegirl "sounds like a vampire to me LOL"

**Jack the Ripper**, I just felt like adding him, though in his defense, he probably would have taken some organs

Alibi – He would have to be really, really old

Motive – Penchant for women of ill repute

**Author-self-insert**, inspired by sharkjumper

Alibi – Making author-self-insert the killer would require avant-garde maneuvers of a kind multiple reviewers would object to and is therefore unthinkable (or is it?). Besides, I'm clearly Bella, which according to some of you makes me a crazy bitch (but I'm trying not to take that personally).

Motive – Psycho

**Timeline **

Bella claims that, sometime after lunch (how vague is that? let's hope that she was more specific with the police), she drove to the west end pass of the park, leaving her car in the last turn off and started to hike into the woods.

2 pm Tanya drove to Port Angeles with her sisters, Irina and Kate, to go shopping.

2 pm Edward had a fight with his parents as the latter were leaving for the weekend. His parents drove away in their car. Edward immediately exited out of the back of his house, heading for a trail that met up with the edge of his parent's property and led up into the national park. He made a nineteen mile hike to the top of the blue trail and spent the afternoon in the meadow.

Bella claims that a few hours after she started her hike (vague again!), she saw Edward in the meadow at the end of the blue trail. She waited a few minutes, thinking that he was going to leave, but he stayed. She double-backed and went up the white trail, and sat on the rocks overlooking the bluff for about an hour.

4 pm Tanya left her sisters in a coffee shop, telling them that she was going to run back to a store to purchase a pair of shoes she'd changed her mind about buying. She never made it to the shoe store.

4:15 pm Tanya was seen by a waitress getting into a silver Volvo in front of Bella Italia. The driver had short red hair.

4:15 – approximately 5 pm, a person or persons unknown drove Tanya to a cabin in the outskirts of Port Angeles. Tanya entered the cabin of her own volition or was carried in. Blows delivered to Tanya's head prior to her death were sufficient to render victim unconscious and are consistent with being struck several times by the driver of car while she was seated in the passenger seat.

Approximately 5 pm, a person or persons unknown made several incisions in the creases behind Tanya's elbows and knees, as well as the neck and inner thigh, all at points where significant blood loss could be expected.

Approximately 5:15 pm Tanya expired.

6:30 pm police responded to an anonymous phone call originating from a pay phone in Forks to find Tanya deceased in the cabin just outside of Port Angeles.

Bella claims that she went back to the meadow. Edward was still there. She hiked back to her truck. It was already dark by the time she made it to the turn off where she'd parked.

9:07 pm sunset.

Edward claims that it was already dark by the time he made it home.

**AN: WHO DO YOU THINK DID IT AND WHY? ****How did he/she pull it off? Was it a cabal of killers?**

**Let me know if you don't want me to give your username.**

**My apologies if you sent me a suspect prior to Nov 26, and I missed it when skimming the reviews to prepare this. Please PM me and I'll add your vote!**


	11. Chapter 11

**Thank you to The Lemonade Stand for the recommendation!**

**Two chapters posted at once: Suspect list and consolidated timeline in the previous chapter.**

**Confession: I added a few lines to the end of the chapter that I posted last week (where Bella expresses her concerns about her hotel room) a few hours after it was posted to try and explain Bella's behavior a bit more. My apologies if you'd already read it but, as it was pointed out to me, it was weak. I hope you think it's improved.**

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 9

'_The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.' – Oscar Wilde_

BPOV

_Last time in _Gothic_, our heroine was caught off guard by a most unexpected invitation to join a certain gentleman in his bed…_

"I'm probably a biter too," I cautioned Edward.

"I'm sure that won't be a problem."

"I don't like sharing blankets."

"We can get the blankets from your bed and bring them back here."

I gaped at him. But the absurdity of the situation was simply too much. I shook my head as though it would help to dispel my confusion. It didn't. So I decided to act as though it were all in jest. I laughed shakily. "Very funny. I'm sorry for waking you up. Or disturbing you. Or whatever." And dropping my head to hide my face, I scurried back to my room.

A few minutes later, I heard knocking on my door. It was Edward.

"What are you doing?" he asked, glancing at my bed, which was covered with papers and books, my laptop open and glowing on the nightstand. He'd thrown on a t-shirt.

"Just some research," I told him.

"You brought all of these books with you?"

"I didn't know which one I would feel like reading when I got here. What did you think was taking up all of that room in my bag?"

He shrugged. "Make-up."

I gazed at Edward dubiously. _Make-up? Me?_

"Aren't you tired?" he asked.

"Not really," I lied.

"Well, if you're going to be staying up anyway, why don't we go back to my room and discuss the case?"

"Now?"

"Might as well. Unless you really need to get this done." Edward waved a hand at the pile on my bed.

It seemed like a set-up to me, but I was too tired and uneasy—my nerves still very much on edge in that very red room with its reputation for ghostly inhabitants, even if I didn't believe in them—and nothing but violent and disturbing prose to distract me, not the sort of stuff to calm a troubled soul, especially when read by the meager light of a cell phone. And if Edward really did have something worth talking about then we might as well get it out of the way, since there was no chance that I would be going to sleep any time soon.

Edward started gathering up the books and dropping them on the bureau as I powered down the laptop.

"You don't have to do that," I told him.

"No problem," he said, pulling the red comforter off of the bed.

"What are you doing?"

"Don't want you to be cold."

My old self would have been more suspicious. Had I been in my right mind, I would have refused. The Edward Cullen who, on more than one occasion, had chanted _Lesbo _as I'd passed in the cafeteria and had been used to saying so many other mocking things to me would only have had nefarious reasons for an invitation like this.

But I didn't have time to think very carefully about any of that as I stood there watching Edward carry my blanket away. It wasn't until the next day, in the full light of morning, that I realized the complete absurdity of my behavior at this juncture, and the realization made me want to drown myself in the shower. At the time of his invitation, however, as I cast uneasy glances into the shadowy corners of that darkened room—plagued, as it supposedly was, by so many ghosts—I wasn't myself. Blame it on the pressure of circumstances. The utter strangeness of the situation. I didn't quite understand what was happening, so I did what I always did in such situations, and kept my mouth shut while waiting to see what would happen next.

Edward led the way back to his room, pushed his own blue comforter out of the way, and dropped mine on the other side of the bed.

"You want me in your bed?" I asked stupidly, gazing at the lone chair in the room, a delicate wicker assembly that looked like it would crumple under my weight. There was a chair in my room. But it was just as fragile.

"No reason not to be comfortable."

I stood there for a minute, knowing that I should really just go back to my room, where I would spend the rest of the night huddled in bed with my cell phone and laptop.

I looked down at my phone, checking the battery. Ten percent.

I would be like the little match girl.

And when the light died…

"I don't believe in ghosts," I reminded him as I perched carefully on the edge of his bed.

"I remember," Edward said, handing me one of his pillows.

"If you had my mother, you would understand," I explained, feeling like some sort of defense was in order. I wrapped myself in the red blanket and sat against the headboard, trying to take up as little room as possible, huddling close to the edge of the mattress. I felt the bed dip as Edward settled in, lying down, I noticed, not sitting up like me. Didn't he want to discuss the case?

I wondered if he thought that I was as foolish as I felt. _It doesn't matter,_ I tried to tell myself. _He already thinks you're an idiot. _But I thought that there had to be some way to salvage the situation. "She-said-that-a-ghost-picked-me-up-out-of-my-crib-once-and-dropped-me-on-the-floor," I confessed quickly.

"What?"

"She said that a ghost picked me up out of my crib and dropped me on the floor. It just happened the one time though."

Edward didn't reply. I had probably made it even worst.

I decided that more explanation was needed. "But another time, a ghost threatened to kill me."

"Threatened to _kill_ you?"

"In a dream. My mother had a dream about a little girl who'd disappeared from the apartment where we were living, and the girl's father told my mother that he was going to kill me, because he was afraid that his daughter was going to come home and see me and think that he'd replaced her. So we moved."

"What the fuck?" I could feel Edward shifting on the bed next to me.

"I don't believe in ghosts though."

"How old were you when she told you that crap?"

"I don't know. I remember that I was four when we moved out of that apartment. Um, I'm sure that I knew before we moved, because I remember looking out the window and wondering if the girl's father had also stood there looking for his daughter. And then—" I stopped. I remembered frightening myself with the notion of the girl's father pushing me out of the window. I had run away and hid behind the couch. "She must have told me about the crib when I was older." I remembered whole weeks when I didn't sleep more than a few hours. Being left alone while my mother was at work or on a date, my eyes darting around the living room as I sat huddled on the couch where I slept, every light in the place on and the tv blaring. Never feeling safe, not even in the middle of the day, but afraid to go outside as well, where I might at least play with kids my age, because Renee had said that there were pedophiles in the parks and that the parents of all of my classmates were probably pedophiles too, so I shouldn't play with my classmates either, not even at school, since they might try to do something inappropriate to me, just like their parents.

Not being one to shirk her responsibilities, Renee would describe for me in lurid detail exactly what a pedophile was and how they liked to hurt little girls.

Alice had been my first real friend and I didn't meet her until I was fourteen, when my mother married Phil and sent me to Forks.

"What kind of mother says that kind of shit to their kid?" Edward asked.

"She said that she could protect me," I explained, thinking to myself that this promise of hers wasn't much good when she left me alone most of the time.

Realizing that what I'd said didn't make sense, I went on. "With her personal power or spiritual energy or something, but she said that I didn't have enough, personal power that is, so I needed her, which I know is bullshit. But I was a stupid kid. She would make me go with her to all of her theosophy or whatever meetings, and they would tell us to put our hands over our heads and feel the energy rushing around, and I never felt anything, so I thought that there was something wrong with me. I remember, one of the spiritualists once started yelling at someone in the group. She was telling him to get out. I realized later that he must have been making fun of her or something, but I thought she was yelling at me, because she could tell that there wasn't any energy around me and that I was empty."

"A bunch of crackpots were making bullshit up and you thought that there was something wrong with you?"

I felt like I was being unfair. "I don't know. Maybe it works for some people and not others. I've got an open mind. I don't believe in ghosts because I've never seen one. But I don't _want_ to see one either. Does that make sense? It's kind of cowardly isn't it?"

"There's no such thing as ghosts, so no, it's not cowardly."

"I think you're biased. Blinded by science."

"Yeah, the scientific method is all about ignoring results."

It was clear by now that Edward had no intention of discussing Tanya. I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing in that bed next to him, but I didn't have the energy to ponder that just then.

I rested my head against the headboard and closed my eyes, pretending for a moment that sitting in a very red blanket in a very blue room in a creepy bed and breakfast next to Edward Cullen wasn't in the least bit out of the ordinary.

"Maybe we should just go to sleep," Edward suggested. "Discuss the case tomorrow."

I started to get up.

"I didn't mean that you should leave," Edward said, reaching out a hand to arrest my movement. "I'm not that tired, you know. We can discuss the case."

"That's stupid," I said, leaning back against the headboard and ignoring the fact that he didn't want me to go back to my room. "You've been up for more than twenty-four hours. It doesn't make sense that doctors, of all people, do that kind of stuff."

"It's not that bad."

"Blurred vision. Dizzy spells. Slurring. Nausea."

"Says the voice of experience."

"I had trouble sleeping when I was a kid."

Edward snorted. "I'm not surprised, with a mother like that."

I hummed.

"Do you see her anymore?" he asked.

"No. Not since right after Tanya died."

"What happened?"

"We had a fight."

"So you had a fucked up childhood. But you got over it and now you study horror. Makes sense. You deal with the shit your mom pulled by studying horror and Jack the Ripper."

"I don't study Jack the Ripper." I looked over at Edward, even though I couldn't see him very well in the dark. "And anyhow, what's with the psychoanalysis?"

A flash of lightening showed me that Edward was turned on his side, facing me. "Just calling it how I see it." Another flash of lightening cast a glow across his features. His eyes were on me.

"I don't psychoanalyze you," I warned him, "so you don't psychoanalyze me."

"Go ahead," he encouraged. "Psychoanalyze me."

I shook my head. "It would be too easy."

"Shall I?" he asked.

"Be my guest," I told him.

Edward rattled off his self-diagnosis: "Unresolved guilt complex and borderline obsessive compulsive personality with a healthy dose of masochism. Driven to work grueling hours at a job he hates to punish himself for the crimes of his youth."

"You forgot narcissism," I corrected him.

"I'm not a narcissist."

"You are. And you have sadly provincial tastes in music. That must reflect a psychosis of some sort. Extreme narrow-mindedness or something."

"How am I a narcissist?"

"You've turned Tanya's death into something that's all about you."

"It is about me."

"You're not the one who died," I reminded him.

"You agree with everyone else? You think that I should just get over it? Forget that someone tried to set me up?"

"I think that when we don't make any progress, and I tell you it's over, that you should give up."

He was silent for a moment. "I'm just supposed to hand the decision over to you?"

"Yep."

I could tell that he was shaking his head.

I explained. "I'm not going to say that Tanya wouldn't want you to give up your life for her. She was a selfish bitch and she would have wanted just that. No, she didn't deserve to die." Despite what Eric said. "But sometimes stuff just happens. You put a lid on it and lock it down."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. There are rules. You need to function." It occurred to me that Edward was just as fucked up as Eric. Not letting go of the past.

"I function."

"You planning on having that family? You plan on getting that private practice? Because last I checked, you wanted those things. So if you aren't working on getting them, then no, you're not functioning. Because your definition of functioning isn't what you've got."

I slid down on the bed a few inches, not quite lying down.

It occurred to me that, for all I knew, Edward was working on getting that family. He could very well have a steady girlfriend and I wouldn't even know it.

Several minutes passed before he spoke again. "What about you? Are you functioning?" he asked me.

"Absolutely," I told him. "I've got everything I want." And I told myself that it was true.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I did not sleep well in that bed next to Edward. How could I?

How could I sleep at all, that is? How could I let myself even sit there next to him?

I told myself that it was just to see what would happen, as though I was an anthropologist watching a chimpanzee in the wild, covertly observing Edward as he settled in for the night. _The ape-man tucks himself in, succumbing to that evolutionary instinct that has kept hominids safe from the nighttime terrors all these millions of years_. Didn't he know that he was tucking himself into bed right next to one of his sworn enemies? Was he really so arrogant that he didn't realize the risk he was running?

I scoffed at my idiocy. What risk was he really running? What could I possibly do to him?

And what was I afraid that he would do to me?

Were this some nonsensical teenage farce, Edward would have arranged for the lights to go out, so that he could carry out an attempted seduction (_attempted_, because of course I would not give in!), all of it captured on a hidden video camera (no doubt my resistance would provide for as much hilarity as his feigned endearments). Such intrigues, of course, were entirely out of the question.

Perhaps _I _ought to have been the animal under study in this situation. Slave to irrational fears. The fear of Edward Cullen, on the one hand, and the fear of my mother's ghost stories, on the other hand. What a child!

Why did I read all those ghost stories if not to try and overcome my mother's influence? So why not try to harden myself to Edward, and face my fear there too?

I let myself slide down the bed an inch.

Why had Edward invited me to his room? To his bed? It was a fucking slumber party, for crying out loud, hardly the work of a fiend. It was something Seth would do, but Seth was Seth.

Edward's motives were entirely inscrutable. So I watched his patch of darkness wearily, as if mere observation would prove fruitful. But I was too tired and his behavior was too strange for me to explain. The situation was too surreal.

_Perhaps I am already asleep_, I thought. _And all of this is a dream._

To be sure, I felt myself begin to drift in and out of consciousness.

Every so often, I would jolt awake, afraid that I'd shifted a fraction of an inch towards Edward or that he'd shifted a fraction of an inch towards me or that I'd committed some other egregious act like talking in my sleep, which I had never done before as far as I knew.

My sleep was far from restful.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Jerking awake to find that my dying cell read six thirty a.m., I determined that the time had come to make a graceful exit.

At some point during the night, the power had come back on and a light was shining dimly through several layers of blue beads and taffeta from a lamp on Edward's side of the bed. It was just enough to see by as I carefully rose and tried to tip toe out of the room.

"I like your pajamas," I heard a snicker behind me.

So much for a smooth exit. Glancing over my shoulder, I chastised him. "And I'd say that I like yours—oh, but you're not wearing any, are you?"

"I think that you like them just fine," Edward replied, throwing his very blue blanket to the side and patting his abs, his t-shirt having risen up, not that I was looking closely enough to observe the general state of his stomach. Or his chest. Or arms. Or…anything else for that matter.

"Ha!" I snapped, turning quickly away.

"You may say _ha!_ but I see you the way you look at me."

I let the sound of the door closing behind me serve as my response. Eric would have been so disappointed.

I saved the berating for my shower. _What the fuck did you do?_ I asked myself, scrubbing my skin a bit more furiously than was probably needed.

Just because I'd no desire to rehash the past didn't mean that I couldn't recall the feelings of isolation and melancholy, the outright despair, that Edward Cullen's past behavior had once helped to evoke.

I pushed away the actual details of what had happened ten years ago, but the sense of dread remained. Did it matter exactly how he'd phrased this or that statement of ridicule once upon a time? No. Banal put-downs. It wasn't interesting. Understanding human psychology wasn't like a murder mystery. People were irrational. Memories could be faked. So only emotions mattered, not details.

The last time someone had tried to bring it up with me—when I'd gone to Alice's group to show my support—I'd walked out in a huff of anger. What good would it do to talk about how much he and everyone else had once hurt me? And anyhow, he hadn't been entirely wrong in his assessment of me either. Everything he'd said back then had been true. It was much better to come to terms with the truth, with the fact that I was utterly unfit for society, than to try and force myself into a mold that I'd never fit.

So I'd walked out of Alice's group. I'd told myself that only Freudians and people who watched too much reality television thought that it was worth plumbing the details of one's past anguish, and really it was just for their own twisted amusement, because dwelling on it certainly did nothing to help a person in the here and now. It just encouraged the repetition of old cycles of depression. My own historical analyses certainly never strayed towards the psychoanalytical. I shied away from biographies—the notion that anyone could ever pretend to truly know another person. I preferred to diagnose my subjects _en masse._ I certainly would never be caught trying to explain Victorian sadomasochism with premature weaning or other mundane childhood traumas, for once the door to that had been thrown open, there would be no end to it. After all, when trying to explain the antisocial behavior of a grown woman, why stop with the broken heart she suffered as a teenaged girl when there were also the questions of what cereal she'd had for breakfast that morning and the age at which she'd been potty-trained? As a historian I could hardly deny that memory mattered, but the desire to reminisce ought not be indulged too much, lest one descend into the maudlin naval-gazing narcissism of a Proust.

And why did everyone think that repression was such a bad thing? It served a purpose. It helped one carry on when there was no logical reason for doing so.

In any case, it only counted as repression if I let it dictate my present, right? And I wasn't letting it dictate the present, was I?

_I had slept in Edward Cullen's motherfucking bed!_

I would simply have to repress the memory of that too. There was no other choice.

Having made my decision, I resolutely steeled my jaw and finished my shower.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Mr. Crowley apologized for the loss of electricity and hoped that we had not been inconvenienced. Edward laughed and said that the inn ought to offer a loss of electricity as standard service. I deemed it best to say nothing.

We ate at the bed and breakfast, Mr. Crowley serving biscuits and porridge on aged dishes that I eyed skeptically.

"Who's Ib nal-deen?" Edward asked, sipping his coffee from a ridiculously dainty tea cup.

"Who?"

"Ib nal-deen?"

I had no idea. _Ib nal-deen. Ib nal-deen._ "Do you mean Ibn al-Nadim?"

Edward shrugged. "Sounds right. Who's that?"

"Ninth century Arab book collector. Why?"

"You kept saying his name last night."

"_What?"_ I could feel my cheeks flaming.

"You kept mumbling his name in your sleep." Edward was studying me carefully.

"I did _not._"

"You did." Edward started grinning. "Do you have a crush on a ninth century book collector?"

"Of course not." It was preposterous. I pressed my hands against my cheeks, trying to cool the skin. "We don't even know what he really looked like."

"You do. You have a crush on a guy who's been dead for twelve hundred years!"

"Shut up." _You sleep with a guy one time—_by accident!—_and he thinks that you're best friends._

"How does something like that even work? I mean, there's virtual sex but this has got to be pushing the limit."

"He loved books," I said, feeling that this was explanation enough. "_Loved_ them." I sighed. "You could rent a book stall and spend all night with the books by yourself. Utterly alone, to read at your leisure." My shoulders rose in an involuntary shiver of excitement.

"Wow. You really take your books seriously." Edward leaned towards me in a conspiratorial fashion. "Do you think about him when you—"

"I don't care to discuss this topic any further," I interrupted primly, patting the lace napkin against my lips.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward took the wheel of the Porsche when we left the bed and breakfast. He drove through the center of town, and turned down the street for _Bella Italia_, glancing at the clock as we passed. "The police timed it a couple of times. And I've timed it myself. It's just a twenty minute drive. Fifteen if you aren't being careful."

I didn't have to ask to know that he was referring to the time it took to get from _Bella Italia_ to the cabin where they'd found Tanya's body.

The scenery we passed had an almost surreal quality. It was one of those crisp autumn days when the sunlight sparkles through the leaves, setting them on fire with shades of crimson and mahogany. Port Angeles prided itself on being a rustic tourist town, and I thought that it looked its best during this time of year, with the quaint old-fashioned shop fronts and dignified architecture lending an antiquated feel.

The picturesque streets soon gave way to tree-lined sidewalks, and then there was just the open road between two red-gold walls of trees.

After a while, the road narrowed to no more than a gravel path, so covered in leaves that it would have been easy to think that the road had actually dead-ended. But Edward kept going, the Porsche shimmying over the loose gravel under the carpet of leaves as the trees on either side crept closer and closer. By the time that the cabin appeared, branches were scratching at either side of the vehicle.

Edward stopped the car in the small clearing in front of a cabin of ramshackle construction. It was a poor man's Queen Anne. The decadence of accretions born of necessity and want rather than excessive wealth. A timeworn well stood to one side of the clearing with a broken cap over the top, and a dilapidated fence wall could be seen through the stand of trees on the other side.

I stared at the tiny cabin. "Why hasn't someone torn it down?" I asked.

"It's actually a historic landmark. Or someone's trying to turn it into one. They're trying to turn this whole area into a park, but that got held up ten years ago and it's been in limbo ever since. The Denalis want it demolished."

"Who owns it now?"

"The city of Port Angeles. They don't want anything to do with it but they don't want the responsibility for destroying a landmark either. They're trying to get the state to take it over."

I watched the wind stir the trees through the window of the car.

I didn't want to get out.

"We can just turn around and go back," Edward offered.

"No." I reached for the door handle. "I'm fine."

I got out of the Porsche and slowly approached the cabin, my arms crossed in front of my chest in a gesture that I knew showed my discomfort, my eyes scanning the two broken windows in the front of the cabin and the trees lining the clearing.

This stretch of woods was just so far out of the way. Did the remains of other cabins stand in the surrounding woods? Or had this cabin always been sitting in the hinterland, the inhabitants shunned by society or, if not shunned, nevertheless wanting nothing to do with it?

I had never been very social. I hated crowds and easily tired of company. It was no accident that I fit in so poorly when I moved to Forks. Were it not for the carefully crafted rules that I now used to govern my social interaction, I might be totally isolated.

Could I ever live alone in a cabin like this? A century and a half ago, when urban development was even more remote, with no one around for miles and only a horse, if I could afford one, to cover the distance?

I thought back to the _Mountains of Madness_—not high school, when I was surrounded by people and only wanted to be alone—no, I thought back to those first two years of college when _I _was the one shunning everyone else, speaking to almost no one and keeping to myself. I remembered staying up all night to read and falling asleep in class. I remembered jagged shards like dreams skittering in the light and the gaps in between. If Alice hadn't come back to the west coast, who knows what would have happened to me? Had she not been crazier—yes, crazier—than me, who is to say that I wouldn't have broken completely? But she needed me to take care of her.

A movement behind me startled me, and I scuttled to the side. I hadn't noticed Edward drawing up alongside.

"The door's padlocked," he said. "But we should be able to see through the windows."

I followed him up to the nearest corner of the cabin, where a single worn shutter hung from a hinge. Edward peered through a pane of the glass, then stepped aside to let me do the same.

Not thinking about the ramifications of what I was doing, I leaned towards the dirty glass and looked. I expected to see the same image that I'd seen captured on the crime scene photos, but I hadn't the benefit of the fluorescent light bulbs that they'd used to take those photos or a clear view. At least, I thought that I should be able to see the stain on the floor where her blood had pooled. Maybe there was still a stain, and I just couldn't see it in the murky light, but it seemed wrong somehow that I couldn't see it, like everyone was somehow mistaken and this wasn't really the place where a teenage girl had died, because how could something so awful have happened without leaving any traces behind?

We went around to all of the windows. Two in the front, one on each side, and none in the back. It was a single room cabin. Plain and unfurnished. Repairs made to the siding and the roof in mismatched timbers and styles.

I wondered when the cabin had last been occupied, but didn't want to ask. Then I decided that I was being foolish and asked anyhow, my voice grating in the chill air. The kind of air that I usually loved.

"1967," Edward said. "It was abandoned and the city foreclosed."

"There must be parties here," I observed. _What an awful thing to say._ "I mean, kids must like to come here. Or they used to, didn't they?"

Edward nodded. "I even came here with Tanya once. The padlock was a joke back then. It got broken so many times that they stopped replacing it after a while."

The padlocked looked fine now. Had the teenagers stopped coming?

If anything, I would have thought that the gruesome aura of death and murder would have drawn them in.

Were the youth of Forks and Port Angeles actually capable of showing some respect?

Then what was I doing here? Playing the part of a ghoul.

Scanning the trees again, I imagined teenagers cavorting around the trunks, flashlights illuminating their flesh as they spun around in the night to some wild chant.

If I hadn't known about Tanya, if I hadn't known what happened to her in this cabin, would I still have felt so very uncomfortable standing there?

I didn't believe in ghosts. It was nonsense to think that I would have noticed anything untoward about that stretch of trees. Otherwise, the whole world would be haunted with everyone who's ever come and gone.

And yet. And yet.

I hated it—I hated it there I hated the trees I hated the cabin I hated the arch over the well and the broken cap I hated the wind I could hear rustling in the dried leaves I hated the flash of sunlight on the exposed window panes I hated the cobwebs I spied through the glass I hated the damp smell of the air. I hated it all. I just hated.

I followed Edward back to the Porsche, and he carefully turned it around before proceeding down the tree-lined avenue. I watched the cabin disappear from sight in the side-view mirror, then kept watching, as if I was worried about something following us.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

We had lunch at a small café a few blocks from _Bella Italia_. The café was almost empty and we sat by the window.

"I shouldn't have insisted you see it," Edward apologized.

I shrugged. "It was just a cabin." I didn't want to talk about it. Couldn't we just sit in silence? Fuck the rules of etiquette. I just wanted quiet. The kind of quiet that I only got to enjoy when I was alone. Couldn't we just have that?

"So what looks good to you?" Edward asked, trying to cheer me up I could tell.

I put down the menu. "Soup."

"I'll bet the soup is good here. Maybe I'll try that too."

I shook my head.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," I told him.

"You're upset."

"I _should _be upset. If I wasn't upset, that would mean that there's something wrong with me."

"I just thought that if you saw it, maybe you would realize why it's so important. Be just as invested as I am."

I didn't say anything.

"I've been there so many times," Edward confessed. "I've forgotten how unnerving it can be."

It made sense. He wanted to shock me into caring. Strip away the cavalier disregard with which I'd been treating Tanya's death.

"Please talk to me," he pleaded.

"There's nothing to say," I replied.

"Yell at me or something. Don't just sit there staring out the window."

"Why would I be angry? It's not your fault. What happened was terrible."

"Still, having to see it up close isn't easy," Edward conceded.

"I should see it up close. I should see it first-hand. Don't you think if people weren't so insulated, that they would do more to stop things like that from happening?" I watched people milling on the sidewalk through the window. Cars crawling down the thoroughfare.

"I think people will keep doing awful things to each other no matter what."

"Then what's the point?"

"I don't know."

At least he didn't bother lying.

I continued. "And what about people who watch horror movies for entertainment? Who think murder mysteries are fun? What do you do with all of us?"

"Do you really think it's just entertainment?"

"I think—" I paused. "I think that I watch horror movies because it's comforting. There's a kind of comfort to the misery. I think, _This is as bad as it can be_. But that's not true. It can be worse. It can be real."

"You're not a serial killer."

"How do you know? Don't I get off on the same things? Maybe it's all just sublimation so that I don't go Lizzy Borden. Isn't that what you all thought? That I was crazy and weird? Well, I am. So I don't eat animals because I could never kill one myself, but if someone tried to hurt me, I'd fight back. And I read stories about monsters that don't exist while the monsters that do exist are left to roam the streets. It could be me. I could go nuts—"

"Stop it. I don't think that you could ever hurt someone."

I laughed. "You don't know anything about me."

"I know that even though you hated me, you saved me—" Edward said, not letting me cut him off. "That's exactly what you did, you saved me. And even though you should still hate me, you've agreed to do this with me."

"I don't have any friends," I argued.

"You have Alice. And I've heard her talk about other friends you have."

"They put up with me."

"I'm sure they have a very good reason."

"I barely function—"

"Last night you said that you function very well."

"I said that I function. I didn't say that I function very well."

"You're a celebrated teacher and author."

I laughed again. "I'm an adjunct professor whose position could get cut at any minute and my book sold about ten copies."

"Eleven. I bought one the other day."

I was dumbfounded. "I wish you hadn't. It's not very good." I felt uncomfortable, imagining him reading my words and judging what I'd written. "Why would you do something like that?"

"I want to know what you're interested in. I haven't finished it yet. But the introduction, well the beginning of the introduction was very enlightening. I feel much better informed about the Reformation now."

"It's not really about the Reformation."

"I distinctly recall reading something about the Reformation. And you know, you're free to return the favor. Come down to the hospital and observe me any time."

"I don't really think they like people doing that."

"Sure they do," Edward shrugged.

"No. That's okay."

"Well, if you ever change your mind, let me know."

The atmosphere between us had lightened significantly, and the waitress, who'd decided just to linger in the background when she noticed the intensity of our discussion, came up to take our orders.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward stayed in the Porsche while I went into _Bella Italia._ Chelsea Giampetroni, the waitress who had witnessed Tanya getting into the Volvo, was now working as the manager. I didn't think that I had much of a shot getting her to talk to me, but I was going to try nevertheless.

I didn't bother trying to hide my reason for wanting to talk to her. I asked for her by name and waited at the hostess' stand. When she walked up, I handed her a piece of paper with my name and cell number and started talking. "I can understand if you don't want to speak to me," I said. "But I was her friend. I know it's been a long time and I'm still not over it. I just want to know what happened."

"This is my place of business," she snapped, crumpling the paper up.

"I didn't know how else to find you."

She studied me for a minute. "You been out to the cabin?" she asked.

I drew away, feeling sick again. Maybe I shouldn't have come after all. I remembered how her brother, Demetri, liked to beat up his girlfriends. I could only imagine his sister having similarly violent hobbies.

"Five minutes," she told me. "Outside by the dumpster."

I went outside and waited, the chill air on my skin calming my stomach, but the smell coming from the dumpster wasn't as pleasant. The slap of a door against brick alerted me to Chelsea's arrival, and I tensed, ready to flee. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, making no effort to blow the smoke away from me.

"It was a silver Volvo," she started, the speech obviously having been repeated many times. "How do I know it was a Volvo? I wanted that car. That very model. Not that I could afford it with this bullshit economy. How do I know it was silver? It was the same color as the nail polish that I was wearing that day. Didn't notice the license plate. How did I remember the girl? She was a bitch. I was standing outside smoking, just like this, minding my own business, and she comes by sneering at me like the smoke is all up in her face. All these people nowadays trying to legislate where and when I exercise my own right to live the way I choose. The car pulled up to the curb here," she pointed a long fingernail, "and this guy with red hair is driving."

The rote nature of her delivery had lowered my defenses. I felt bold enough to ask a question. "Red hair?"

"I wanted that too. Exactly that color. So hard to get out of a box, you know. I almost yelled for him to wait a minute so that I could get a pic, but he was gone, with the bitch blathering at him about where has he been and he's lucky she's even talking to him after what he put her through."

"Did he say anything?"

"Nah. Not that I could hear. Seemed like he just saw her walking down the street and stopped, pulling over to the wrong side so that she could get in without having to cross."

"Would you recognize him if you saw him again?"

"You're thinking he looked like that other guy who keeps coming around asking me questions and bothering my brother? They said it wasn't him, but whoever it was sure had the same color hair. I made him let me get a pic. But he wouldn't leave me alone. Tried to get me to agree to hypnosis. Like I'm going to do something like that—they'd probably get me clucking like a chicken or convince me that I was abducted by aliens or something. It doesn't matter. I didn't see the guy long enough to even give the cops a sketch. The car was just sitting there less than a minute and the guy had shades on. Big ones. Covered half his face."

It was all so random. If someone wanted to set Edward up, wouldn't they have made sure there was more than one eyewitness?

"Was there anyone else on the street?" I asked.

"I have no idea. I'm telling you what I saw right in front of me at that exact second. I didn't see anyone else."

I couldn't think of any other questions besides _Are you lying for your brother?_ and I didn't have the courage for that. So I thanked her for her time and wondered why Edward thought I would be able to succeed where he, the police and the FBI had already failed.

She was about to go back inside when it occurred to me to ask why she'd changed her mind about talking to me.

"Because you didn't like the look of that cabin," she said. "You're not some gossip-mongering reporter or thrill-seeking freak just hassling me for kicks."

As she went back into the restaurant, it occurred to me that she wasn't as half as intimidating as I'd imagined.

I wondered what it must be like, having a brother who enjoyed hurting women.

Then it struck me, more forcibly than ever before, that Tanya's killer could very well have family in Forks or Port Angeles. I could have seen the killer at the grocery store. At _The Lodge._ We may have even gone to school together.

**AN: Make sure you check out the suspect list in the previous chapter.**

**REVIEWERS REWARDED WITH AN OUTTAKE FROM BELLA IN GRAD SCHOOL (A LITTLE LESS DEPRESSING THAN BELLA AS AN UNDERGRAD), INCLUDING HER INTRODUCTION TO A CERTAIN DEAD BOOK COLLECTOR, UPON WHOM SHE MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE A CRUSH! **

**Also, I suspect that some of my outtakes are being truncated (I'm supposed to get 8000 characters damn it). If your outtake was truncated, please PM me and I'll send you the ending.**

**Some of my guest reviews are so insightful! And yet I have no way to reply directly :( A guest reviewer pointed out that it seemed strange in the previous chapter that Bella didn't tell Edward about being confronted by Aro (the same issue was raised by another reviewer to whom I was able to reply directly). Did I give that impression? I can't remember if I meant to do so. The run-in with Aro might have been covered by Bella telling Edward all "about the Denalis." But if she didn't tell Edward, I'm sure it's because, like with the anonymous letters and the dead animal, she just doesn't take threats against herself seriously (low self-esteem, anyone?). She's not trying to get Edward to like her, per se, she's just not being actively hostile (though making him listen to Rasputina could be considered an act of violence – I say this as a fan who owns several of their CDs and has seen them in concert, and yes, I coerced a friend who I may or or may not have been secretly angry at to go with me to that concert). There is also the fact that I just might not see something which is obvious to you – which is why I love it when you point these things out!**

**Rec: Take a Little Trip by KristenLynn**

In high school, geeky Edward tutored popular Bella. It ended badly. Four years later, Edward reappears in one of grad student Bella's classes. Both have changed. A lot. Will it be enough? AU/AH,OOC

Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance/Drama - Chapters: 16 - Words: 102,946 - Reviews: 672 - Favs: 833 - Follows: 492 - Updated: Jul 21, 2010 - Published: Nov 30, 2009 - Bella, Edward - Complete


	12. Chapter 12

**18Dec2014****– if you started reading on or after this date, you knew this was coming. **

**Otherwise, some explanation is called for: It occurred to me that a real gothic serial would be appearing in a newspaper or magazine in the midst of news articles and advertisements. And who am I to deny the people their slice of authenticity?**

**Alas, Meyers still owns all, damn it.**

**FANFIC TIMES**

_All the news that the others won't print_

_Moral Ethics Group Wants _Gothic_Banned_

- Thomas de Quincey

A moral ethics coalition has petitioned to have "Gothic," a serial published in this paper by author-self-insert, banned. "If it were just sex, we wouldn't mind," one member of the coalition explained. "But its suggestion of degraded moral standards is beyond the pale. Why, to think that a young woman, when faced with the charms of a handsome, upstanding young man like that dashing Edward Cullen, could conceive of doing anything but throw herself at him is outrageous! We won't stand for it."

The coalition's catch-phrase, "burn the fanfic," has reportedly been circulated via emails, texts and blog posts. Since very few people are actually reading "Gothic," the drive to have it banned isn't very widespread.

We will continue to bring you news as the story breaks.

**-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-**

**MURRAY'S RED TAIL SOAP**

_It is THE way to get out all of the most indelible stains!_

_Just listen to what these real housewives have to say about it:_

'Before Murray's Red Tail Soap, I would have to scrub and scrub to get my husband's laundry clean. Now, just one quick soak, and it is good as new!'

'Murray's Red Tail Soap made my whites just sparkle!'

_Murray's Red Tail Soap. In all your finer home goods stores._

**-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-**

**GOTHIC, by author-self-insert**

_The most shocking tale of decadence and immorality to cross your computer screen in decades._

_Rush to your computer and read it today._

_**-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-**_

**HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING DEPRESSED LATELY?**

**Is there just a little less pep to your pep?**

_**You need more FANFICTION!**_

Fanfiction has been anecdotally proven to distract readers from their woes for grossly inappropriate periods of time.

Readers report that they lose time. Sometimes they even forget what was bothering them before they started reading.

**The experts agree:**

**READ MORE FANFICTION FOR A HAPPIER LIFE!**

**-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-**

**Murder of Local Girl Still Unsolved**

By Ambrose Bierce

This paper's recent efforts to enlist the aid of the public in solving Tanya Denali's murder have inspired the police to renew their efforts on her behalf. Meanwhile, the public's suspicions and theories continue to pour in. Grateful for their support, we are publishing the most recent submissions with the hope that they generate more leads:

**Edward**

Alibi – Bella saw him in the woods at the time of the murder…unless he has a double!

Motive – Tanya had just cheated on him

- Yay: JessaCloud "Sometimes I think maybe Bella just *thought* she saw Edward in the meadow, but he wasn't really there?" 4Dec, eustaciavye1 "Edward did it. Bella is totes the next victim." 5Dec, JinxedBookaholic243 "Does he have a secret crazy twin? I'm borrowing from pretty little liars, yes." 6Dec

**Jasper**, Edward's friend

Alibi – was supposedly in Texas at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

Votes:

- Yay: Capricorn75 "Jasper did it! Okay, no reason for saying that, I'm just naming my suspect early on. Calling shotgun, if you will." Nov19, WiltshireGlo "I still think Jasper knows more even if he wasn't the killer. There had to have been more than one person involved." 4Dec, Capricorn75 "My top 3 suspects are- in no particular order- Jasper, Alice, and Aro (aka BOB from Twin Peaks)." 6Dec

- Nay: Cared "I don't suspect Jasper or Alice" 18Nov

**Alice**

Alibi – was supposedly in Mississippi at the time of the murder

Motive – Tanya and Edward led the brat pack who made Alice's high school years such a torment

Votes:

- Yay: Guest on 14Nov, LRK680 "I believe this whole thing is about Edward. I think some psycho wanted to be him, his house was empty and his car was in the driveway, I'll bet it actually WAS his car. Someone knew how to get into his house and get his key, then they pretended to BE Edward with the wig (did the killer collect Edward's real hair from haircuts or was it synthetic?). Tanya was just serendipitous, angered by her unfaithfulness and wanting to punish her (while Edward). It probably was a long slow train ride to crazy for this killer. Eric could very well be that crazy, the knife wound could have come from Tanya fighting back, also it worries me that Alice would have the skills to pull this off (although she's kinda tiny, so I'm thinking not her because of that). Tanya probably thought it really was Edward when she was getting in the car, especially since the large sunglasses covered most of the psycho's face." 4Dec, lee21761 "Not sure if she could be the killer but was she really in Mississippi or was there another episode..." 4Dec, Capricorn75 "My top 3 suspects are- in no particular order- Jasper, Alice, and Aro (aka BOB from Twin Peaks)." 6Dec

- Nay: Cared "I don't suspect Jasper or Alice" 18Nov

**Bella**

Alibi – Saw Edward in the woods at the time of the murder (…but no one saw her, did they?)

Motive – 1. Tanya and Edward led the brat pack who made Bella's high school years such a torment. 2. Plot to destroy Edward's traitorous girlfriend and swoop in to save Edward from prosecution, all in a desperate gamble to make Edward like her (really? desperate much!)

- Yay: wonderfullybedazzled "She seems to work hard to keep up her professional persona, reminding herself of acceptable social discourse." 4Dec, SandPrincess13 "Bella turns into a shapeshifter without her own knowledge and is out to annihilate the vampires by accusing them of serial killing. ._. She is the prime suspect, and it is highly possible that Edward is a vampire. So, the plan to destroy Edward makes sense. And then she might have contacted random serial killer who likes to pretend that he is a vampire and pumps the blood out of the victims body after which said serial killer drinks the blood." 4Dec, punkrose 86 "Something keeps nagging at me making me think Bells is the murderer" 5Dec, Bevey99 "Honestly I suspected Bella. Motive, and opportunity. And, by saying he didn't do it. It through any slight suspicion off of her." 7Dec

**Mike** **Newton**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

- Yay: EdwardsFirstKiss "I think either James or Mike" 4Dec, shaz308 "I think Mike nay have more to do with things too though I have a feeling it was a join effort." 4Dec

**Jessica**, Tanya's friend

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

**Lauren**, Tanya's friend

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive - ?

**Eric**

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive – Tanya and Edward led the brat pack who made Eric's high school years such a torment.

- Yay: LRK860 "Or, I'm leaning towards an adult for this, of all the teenagers involved, Eric is the only one who I think would snap (if Alice was really in Mississippi)." 4Dec, LRK680 "I believe this whole thing is about Edward. I think some psycho wanted to be him, his house was empty and his car was in the driveway, I'll bet it actually WAS his car. Someone knew how to get into his house and get his key, then they pretended to BE Edward with the wig (did the killer collect Edward's real hair from haircuts or was it synthetic?). Tanya was just serendipitous, angered by her unfaithfulness and wanting to punish her (while Edward). It probably was a long slow train ride to crazy for this killer. Eric could very well be that crazy, the knife wound could have come from Tanya fighting back, also it worries me that Alice would have the skills to pull this off (although she's kinda tiny, so I'm thinking not her because of that). Tanya probably thought it really was Edward when she was getting in the car, especially since the large sunglasses covered most of the psycho's face." 4Dec, chosmer "I want to say Eric even tho 90% of me believes he's innocent. My theory is he got that wound from Tanya when she put up a fight when he kidnapped her. But we all know it's James." 4Dec

**James**, Edward and Jasper's friend

Alibi – Was on First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive – Does he need one? Everyone hates James. Except, of course, the people who flip the script and make him the hero of their ffn.

Votes:

- Yay: Angelari7 "James maybe?" 31Oct, cejsmom "my money is on James" 19Nov, 2brown-eyes "possible foreshadowing…James perhaps?" 18Nov, GorGirl "I bet it was James" 25Nov "I'm still going with James. I bet he had sex with Tanya, too, and wanted her to be his. She was too much of a f*** to commit to anyone, so he killed her and drank her blood because he thinks he's a vampire." 4Dec, jansails "James, Felix, or Demetri, or their wives/girlfriends did the deed?" 4Dec, wonderfullybedazzled "Aro or James could be the killer." 4Dec, chosmer "…we all know it's James." 4Dec, 2402a "I truly believe that it is James" 4Dec, EdwardsFirstKiss "I think either James or Mike" 4Dec, Susie Mook "I had thought James" 5Dec, JulieToo "For me, it's a tie between James and Aro as to who is the killer of Tanya. I'm thinking Twin Peaks weirdness mixed in with Bella's ghosts and living-in-the-books lifestyle. Yum!" 6Dec

**Irina**, Tanya's sister

Alibi – She was pretty young, and with Kate at another shop

Motive – Crazy

- Yay: jansails "Or maybe it was Irina- she is off her rocker, right?" 4Dec

**Victoria**, is she in this story?

Alibi – ?

Motive - ?

Votes:

- Yay: Fakin' it "Victoria. She has red hair, could've had it tucked into her shirt to make it look short. She did it because James slept with Tanya, and she's a jealous, crazy lady. Or James and Victoria working together, just because they are psycho. Maybe they were into blood play and snuff, and it was a game to them. I'm sure Tanya would've agreed to a threesome considering her penchant for sex, and wouldn't have known how deadly the consequences could be. If Tanya was raped while unconscious, killer must've used a condom, or else the police would've found semen and done DNA testing on it…. I still think Victoria is a good possibility. Maybe she knew someone who had a Volvo like Edward's and she dressed like Edward and tried to look like Edward to fool Tanya, not to set it up with eyewitnesses. She just wanted *Tanya* to think she was getting into Edward's car long enough to get her away without a struggle. That's why there wasn't more of an effort at setting up Edward for the murder with eyewitnesses. The effort was all for Tanya's benefit, so she wouldn't realize the danger until it was too late. And then, after she murdered Tanya, she called James and told him what she'd done with the girl he'd cheated on her with, and he was impressed, being a psycho. He then called in the murder after Victoria was away from the cabin. It may have even been a coincidence that Edward got blamed, or James may have known that Edward wasn't at the party and knowing how Victoria lured Tanya away by pretending to be Edward, he may have then hoped Edward would get the blame, so Victoria would be safe.`" 4Dec

- Nay:

**Felix Manning**, had sex with Tanya, mechanic at the place where Tanya's father took his cars

Alibi – ?

Motive – ?

- Yay: jansails "James, Felix, or Demetri, or their wives/girlfriends did the deed?" 4Dec

**Demitri Giampetroni**, had sex with Tanya, brother of waitress who is the last person to see Tanya alive

Alibi – ?

Motive – ?

- Yay: jansails "James, Felix, or Demetri, or their wives/girlfriends did the deed?" 4Dec

**Carlisle**

Alibi – Was in Seattle at the time of the murder with his wife (of course, you will recall that spouses can't be compelled to testify…)

Motive – Was he one of the men that Tanya was having an affair with?

Votes:

- Yay: LRK860 "You have me wondering about Carlisle. Didn't Edward say his parents wanted him to date Tanya, why? Small town gossip surely would have zoomed in on her at some point. Or a good visit to the good doctor because of an STD scare." 20Nov, WiltshireGlo "I'm beginning to wonder about Carlisle" 4Dec, JessaCloud "Could he have been using Edward's car and killed Tanya?" 4Dec , SandPrincess13 "It could be Carlisle, but that doesn't explain where Esme was at the moment. I believe that Carlisle would have known the points that could be used to drain someone, but what would be do it with? Syringe?" 4Dec, roxiegirl "Hmmm, the precision of the knife slices makes me think some medical training. ...maybe Carlisle got her pregnant and had to kill her." 4Dec

**Mike Newton's father**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – ?

Motive – Didn't want anyone to know that he was having sex with Tanya

**Grocery store manager**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – ?

Motive – Didn't want anyone to know that he was having sex with Tanya

**Gas station attendant**, had sex with Tanya

Alibi – ?

Motive – Didn't want anyone to know that he was having sex with Tanya

**Aro Denali**

Alibi – ?

Motive – Psycho (poor Tanya)

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "Her sisters knew an awful lot about her sexual exploits, what about Daddy? How long were the girls sitting in the coffee shop, who came to get them" 20Nov, CindyWindy1 "Mr. Denali makes a fine suspect. Acting unhinged and irrationally angry now, and in the past he threatened to horrifically murder high school aged Bella." 27Nov, EnchantedbyTwilight "I am all in for Aro being the killer - Daddy issues abound in this story - molestation? And Aro's reaction to Bella visiting the hospital. With Irina seeing vampires and the manner in which Tanya was killed, there is something ritualistic about it. I also see cult involvement of sorts, so maybe there are several involved as well." 4Dec, sharkjumper "I'm now totally obsessed with Renee's obsession for pedophiles... I feel there is something with that tidbit of info. Was Renee molested as a child? Maybe by Aro? Maybe Aro had his own kids in a p*** ring? Tanya was too old to be the victim of a p*** ring...but there was something ritualistic about her death..." 4Dec, majose "Aro definitely gives the psycho vibe." 4Dec, wonderfullybedazzled "Aro or James could be the killer." 4Dec, Guest "It was Colonel Mustard, in the parlor with a knife! Lol Still no clue, Renee is a freak, could she know of a group in Forks that does bizarre or satanic rituals? She grew up there then left with Bella. Right? Maybe Aro is part of this group, and Tanya was picked as a sacrifice (kind of like The Lottery). He just can't deal with anything anymore, just like his other daughters. The only thing throwing me off is the apparent randomness of the volvo and red-headed drivers abduction of her. Was it random? Or was the person following her, watching and waiting for an opening to swoop in and whisk her off to her untimely death? This person must have known that almost all the teenagers in town were on the beach. Hmmm..." 4Dec, 2old4fanfic "Clearly Aro has been both abuser and abused. His daughters' history of promiscuity and mental issues all point to sexual abuse by a close associate. The abuse by someone who is supposed to keep you safe causes a mental schism. Aro loves and hates his daughters for 'allowing' him to abuse them and especially Tanya, for having sex with anyone who isn't him. Multiple stab wounds, overkill, indicate a close relationship with the killer (which may only be in the killer's mind). Aro wants to get back at Edward because Tanya may actually have liked Edward, which would enrage her there. Also, I suspect he threatened his other daughter, Kate, to give false testimony" 4Dec, Capricorn75 "My top 3 suspects are- in no particular order- Jasper, Alice, and Aro (aka BOB from Twin Peaks)." 6Dec, JulieToo "For me, it's a tie between James and Aro as to who is the killer of Tanya. I'm thinking Twin Peaks weirdness mixed in with Bella's ghosts and living-in-the-books lifestyle. Yum!" 6Dec, nitammi "I am putting her mother on associative alert, along with Aro (pedo?) With Irina having some traumatic involvement." 6 Dec

**Renee**, Bella's mother

Alibi - ?

Motive - ?

- Yay: sharkjumper "Hmmmmmmm... Why is your suspects list missing Renee and Phil?"4Dec, majose "It could very well be Edward! Or Renee or a friend of her (Phill?)." 4Dec, Guest "So i'm going for Renee, two things stuck out for me. Firstly the weird things Renee would say to her when she was a kid and that "she said that she could protect me" and the last time they saw each other was after fight right after Tanya's murder. Plus right at the end when Bella says "then it struck me, more forcibly than ever before, that Tanya's killer could very well have family in Forks". Renee wanted to protect Bella from her monsters, which would be Tanya and Edward, kill one and set up the other." 5Dec, KTNCullen "Hmmmmm...could Bella's creepy mom have had something to do with it? I feel like that was foreshadowing about her knowing the killer's family." 6Dec, nitammi "I am putting her mother on associative alert, along with Aro (pedo?) With Irina having some traumatic involvement." 6 Dec

**Phil**, Bella's stepfather

Alibi - ?

Motive - ?

Votes:

- Yay: sharkjumper "What is up with Phil? Where is he now? Does he have red hair?" 4Dec, majose "It could very well be Edward! Or Renee or a friend of her (Phill?)." 4Dec

**Unknown serial killer**

Alibi - ?

Motive – Psycho serial killer who just happened to have short red hair and drive a car that looked like Edward's

- Yay: sharkjumper "I think we have to start dissecting the anonymous notes that Bella has been getting as of late, but this one in particular: "The strangeness of the figure, and its being so close akin to his own nature, attracted him." My theory is that the killer offed Tanya (and others) as sacrifice for Bella. I have 1 dollar running on a mysterious serial killer. I can't pick a suspect from the current lineup, but I'm very intrigued by Eric's wound and Alice's nuthouse stint." 4Dec

**Unknown female**

Alibi – ?

Motive - ?

- Yay: Rebadams7 "I can't be specific yet but I believe there will be a female in this female could give blows to the head with a heavy object to inflict the damage without crushing the skull and well opening the veins might be a simple way to murder thinking she's going to make it look like a suicide and no one will notice the blows to the head" 4Dec

**Someone from La Push**, it wouldn't be fair to leave them out

Alibi – Just about everyone was at First Beach at the time of the murder

Motive – 1. Maybe Tanya found that pirate gold that's supposed to be buried in La Push (yes, I was serious about this. If _Oak Island_ can have its own show, then I can have pirate gold at La Push). 2. Needed to hide fact that they'd had sex with Tanya.

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "What about the boys on the reservation? Who did she sleep with from there?" 20Nov, LRK860 "You were serious about the pirate's gold? That opens up another can of worms. Although, that would be big news, and the LaPush residents would want it for themselves. So maybe the tribe killed her ritualistically to throw everyone off?" 4Dec

**Police**, maybe just some of them or all of them (ugh?)

Alibi – ?

Motive – They were having sex with Tanya

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "WHY didn't the police investigate further, did Tanya sleep with some of them?" 20Nov

**Wives and girlfriends of everyone who Tanya had sex with**

Alibi – ?

Motive – They were having sex with her

Votes:

- Yay: Guest "I've got no clue where to begin to whittle down possible suspects who wanted Tanya dead. Lots of wives and girlfriends, for sure." 20Nov (yes this is the same guest who cast the other votes noted for this day – he/she was ON FIRE!)

**Parent of kid who's snapped (like maybe Eric's parents)**

Alibi - ?

Motive – Kid's snapped

Votes:

- Yay: LRK860 "Or, I'm leaning towards an adult for this, of all the teenagers involved, Eric is the only one who I think would snap (if Alice was really in Mississippi). Or, maybe the parent of a tortured child (like the Chief), finally had enough and wanted revenge for the hurt and abuse? And we still don't know who owns the cabin in the woods and who in the area knew about it." 4Dec

**Charlie**, Bella's father

Alibi - ?

Motive - ?

- Yay: eesti "I hate him." 4Dec

**Jacob**, is he in this story?

Alibi - ?

Motive - ?

- Yay: eesti "I hate him." 4Dec

**SandPrincess13**, reviewer of "Gothic"

Alibi - ? but she was probably taking a test

Motive – Why not?

- Yay: SandPrincess13 "I confess, I did it" 4Dec

**Everyone**

Alibi – if everyone is the killer then no one's alibi is any good, they're just covering for each other. And as for the call…maybe they wanted to make sure that Tanya was found when everyone seemed to have an alibi…

Motive – Cult like in _Wicker Man_. I mean the original movie, of course. And Edward's the ginger! Sacrificing him was part of the whole ritual!

- Yay: VampiresHaveLaws "I pretty much suspect everyone. Seriously, everyone. Bella, Edward, Alice, Irina, Kate. All of them…This all screams ritualistic to me. The placement of the cuts especially. That's so specific. Medical, even. Some messed-up ritual to try and make Tanya "pure" by draining her? It could be cult related, those in higher places, and that's why the police didn't follow through with the investigation the way they should have. But then why only one murder? Why not more? Then we have Irina and her talk of vampires (she was a kid when Tanya was murdered, right? And kids unconsciously pick up on all sorts). And then there are the letters being sent to Bella and the dead animal turning up on her doorstep the day after she agrees to help Edward. And Eric's scar (what the hell did those kids do to him?) But then this doesn't explain why they/he/she would try and frame Edward. If he was even framed. And it doesn't explain why someone/he would report it all by making that call." 4Dec

**Vampire**, seen by Irene going in and out of Tanya's room

Alibi – Vampires don't exist (supposedly)

Motive – An insatiable thirst for life-blood

Votes:

- Yay: Roxiegirl "sounds like a vampire to me LOL"

**Jack the Ripper**, I just felt like adding him, though in his defense, he probably would have taken some organs

Alibi – He would have to be really, really old

Motive – Penchant for women of ill repute

**Author-self-insert**, author of "Gothic" (this suspect was inspired by sharkjumper)

Alibi – Making author-self-insert the killer would require avant-garde maneuvers of a kind multiple reviewers would object to and is therefore unthinkable (or is it?).

Motive – Psycho

**AN: The newspaper man Pulitzer and his rivals would indeed make appeals to the public like this, and offer rewards for any clues that might lead to a break in a case…Translation: Give the paper a scoop. I probably won't update the suspect list every week but I wanted to do so this time as thanks to the reviewers who so kindly sent their thoughts or thanked me for providing the list in the first place. Much appreciated!**


	13. Chapter 13

**Many thanks to VampiresHaveLaws for the rec!**

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 10

'_Or is it fear turns startled reason back…_

_A dreadful friend it is, a terror kind,_

_A flaming sword to guard the tree of life.'_

_Edward Young_

BPOV

_Last time in _Gothic, _our heroine interrogated the waitress whose testimony against the benighted Edward Cullen was so very damning. The results, alas, of said interrogation were not promising._

I expected Edward to be more disappointed when I told him what happened with the waitress.

"There's nothing new," I said. I was afraid that he would be upset that I hadn't asked Chelsea about covering for her brother. But if so, he didn't mention it.

"That's a good point though about the witnesses."

I had told him my theory: If it really was all a set-up, why weren't there more witnesses to Tanya being picked up by a guy who looked like Edward driving a silver Volvo? The killer had just caught a lucky break with that waitress coming forward. I shrugged. "I don't see how it helps though. Unless there was someone who saw everything and didn't come forward."

"Maybe they were going to come forward, but they were waiting for something."

"Waiting for what?"

"I don't know. Maybe they wanted to make sure that there weren't any loose ends. Like they were waiting for the trial."

"Wouldn't that look weird? Waiting to come forward only after the trial started?"

"Maybe they had a good reason for keeping quiet. Or maybe they left town, like you, and didn't realize what happened."

It sounded awful coincidental to me. "Do you remember anyone besides me leaving town right after that?"

Edward shook his head. "Jasper and Alice were already gone. College didn't start for a month and a half. There was no reason for anyone else to leave in the middle of July unless they had some trip planned with their families."

"What about the students in Port Angeles?"

"I could just as well ask about the ones in La Push. How obsessive are we going to be?"

"No one in La Push could get away with impersonating you," I observed. "And obsession is your department."

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward drove the rest of the way to Forks. I was going to have dinner with my father that night and then I was going to question Edward's parents the next day. I wasn't looking forward to either.

"Hey Bells," Charlie greeted me when he got home.

"Hi dad." I was cooking lasagna and a chocolate cake. I figured it would be easier getting information out of him if he was in a food coma.

"That got any meat in it?" he asked, sniffing suspiciously at the scent wafting from the kitchen.

"You're more than welcome to cook some meat to add to your portion," I informed him sweetly.

He grumbled and settled into an armchair in front of the tv.

"What's this?" he queried as I handed him a Vitamin R.

"I'm just so grateful that you let me stay here while I'm visiting." I had decided that I would be much more successful in my detecting if I adopted an upbeat demeanor. People like happy people, don't they? I could be happy. For a while.

Charlie studied me carefully. Perhaps my smile was too wide. "You know that you're more than welcome to stay here just as often as you'd like," he said.

"Sure sure."

"But I'm going fishing tomorrow morning bright and early."

"That's alright, I have some stuff I need to do anyways."

"What stuff?"

"Visiting Mrs. Brandon. Alice wanted me to check in on her."

"That's nice of you."

I nodded.

"Except she's not in town."

"What?"

"She's up in Seattle, seeing Alice. Thought you'd know that, seeing as how Alice sent you down here and whatnot."

I pursed my lips. "Well, she didn't send me down here, per se. But since I was here, I knew that she wouldn't want me to pass up the opportunity."

"So why are you down here?"

"Oh, there's some stuff in my room that I wanted to pick up. Left some old mementos under the loose floorboard in the closet." It wasn't a lie, technically. And my father would not support my real reasons for coming.

"There's a loose floorboard in the closet?"

"Sure is."

"Hmm. Didn't know that."

"Yep."

"I should probably fix that. Make sure it holds tight."

"But then where would people hide their mementos?"

"Some place that they don't go forgetting they're there."

"If I hadn't forgotten it was there, I would have had no reason to come home now would I?"

"Visiting your dad isn't reason enough?" Charlie asked in mock offense.

I was clearly not cutout for subterfuge, but I was determined to contine playing dumb. No matter how stupid I sounded. I smiled weakly. "You know that's not what I meant. You set me up for that."

He chuckled. "Yeah, I did. And you fell for it, too."

Interrogating him about Tanya's murder was going to be oodles of fun.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I waited until Charlie was back in his armchair, staring at the game on tv.

"Hey dad," I started.

He grunted. I decided this was a positive sign. If I could get him talking without really paying attention to the conversation, I might be able to make some progress.

"You know who just started working at the university? Jasper Hale."

"Huh."

"Yeah, and you know who else is living in Seattle? He's a doctor now. Edward Cullen."

"Hmmph."

"Alice is dating Jasper."

I waited for the grunt but there wasn't one.

"It made me wonder. Whatever happened to that case?" Charlie would know the case that I meant. "Edward's clearly moved past it but it must still suck for him to come back here."

Still nothing. Maybe he was asleep.

"Dad?"

Charlie turned off the tv and looked at me. "What do you want?"

So much for subterfuge. "I was just wondering if any new leads had come up."

"The case was in Port Angeles, not Forks."

"I know that they kept you in the loop."

"I can't talk about a case that isn't solved."

I fiddled with the strings hanging loose from the seat cushion. "Maybe if you didn't use specifics, you could just tell me whatever isn't confidential. I could give you an insider's perspective."

"Insiders?"

"Yeah, I went to school with all of them."

"I thought you weren't friends with any of that crowd."

"I wasn't."

Charlie's mustache twitched.

"I still knew them," I said.

"Don't you think that I already went over every angle of that case?"

I shrugged.

He shook his head. "I still go over the files every now and then. Staying up nights trying to figure out who killed that girl."

"I guess that I didn't realize it was that important to you."

"First of all, it could have been you. You could have been the girl that they found in that shack. Second of all, you don't think that I would have done everything I could to solve a case that you were involved in?"

"I wasn't really involved."

"You were involved enough."

"I just told the truth."

Charlie fell silent again.

"Dad, you do know that I told the truth, don't you?"

"Bells, if you weren't my own daughter, I would have been sure that you'd lied."

I didn't know what to say.

"Look," he continued. "I know you told the truth, but there was an eyewitness who put that boy with Tanya Denali an hour before she was killed. His hair was found at the scene. Her blood was in his car. You might be able to explain away the forensic evidence, but you can't get rid of an eyewitness. Someone saw that boy with that girl at exactly the same time you say that you saw him in that damn meadow. If I weren't your father, I'd be pissed at you for ruining a near perfect case. And believe me, this town wants that killer behind bars."

Charlie took another swig from his beer and played with the remote.

"So what?" I asked. "They're never going to catch him?"

He sighed. "They come up with new techniques every day. Cold cases get solved. I hope they catch him."

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

The next morning, after Charlie left, I pulled down the stairs to the attic and climbed up.

I remembered what he'd said: _He still went over the files every now and then, staying up at night…_

I knew that there were a couple of boxes of files in the attic. I wasn't supposed to know that they were there, of course, but Charlie had an interest in cold cases and he'd brought some stuff from his old precinct when he'd settled in Forks. A couple of times, he had even managed to come up with a lead that led to an arrest.

I sat on the floor of the attic and started going through the boxes.

As if Edward's binders and the sight of the cabin itself weren't enough to make me sick, these files were chock full of grisly photos and details of a whole host of crimes. I went through the folders as quickly as possible, never pausing any longer than it took to realize that the folder in front of me wasn't what I wanted, but I still couldn't help catching glimpses of images and words that I wished I hadn't seen. All of it suggesting a meanness of spirit and a coldness of heart and, worst still, a grotesque perversity of the human conscience. It turned my stomach to think that such heinous acts could be a source of glee to monsters and demons in the flesh.

When I found Tanya's file at last, I almost put it down and moved on to the next one, my vision having blurred with the desire to un-see.

I stopped and opened it again. I recognized the crime scene photos that I'd moved past so hastily in Edward's apartment. Photocopies of many of the same notes and timelines.

There were, however, several items that I'd never seen before. A series of photographs taken at First Beach.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Quil Ateara was pickled as punch when I asked him to give me a lift to La Push. And he made sure that Embry knew all about it too. Clearly, their amateur pissing match was still going strong.

"Technically," I said, glancing over at Quil, "I called the garage, not you. If Embry had answered, I would have asked him for a ride instead."

Quil grinned even wider. "I keep telling you, the fates want us together. Of course, I was the one who answered the phone. It's—what do they call it? Kismet."

I knew that this was nothing more than harmless flirting, which was something I had found that people sometimes did to pass the time. It was reserved for acquaintances between whom there was no chance of anything beyond comfortable familiarity. Besides, Quil was completely devoted to Claire. "Sure sure. You would think that the two of you would have better things to fight over."

"The bonus with fighting over you is that we get to bet who can make you blush more."

"Asshole," I joked, smacking him lightly on the arm in imitation of an impertinence I'd witnessed between Embry and Quil on many an occassion. We'd first bonded the summer after I graduated from undergrad, when my truck broke down on the outskirts of LaPush and they rescued me. We bonded over horror movies. They were among the first real friends I ever made but I still felt sometimes like I was faking. Like now. Punching Quil on the arm. That was alright, wasn't it? Something friends did.

"Hey, I'm driving here."

"Stop being a crybaby."

Quil left me at Sue Clearwater's and promised to be back to pick me up in an hour.

"Are you sure that you don't want to come along?" I asked, hoping he'd turn me down but not wanting to be rude either. I thought my conversation with Sue would go down better in private.

"Nah, I'm going to see Claire."

"Isn't she a little young for you?" I asked. She was really only a few years younger and already in her twenties, but Quil deserved to be nettled a little. Friends nettled.

"Afraid of the competition?"

I thought of flipping him cordially off as he drove away, but didn't want Sue to catch sight of me doing it. Good thing too, because she was already opening the door when I turned around.

"Bella!" she greeted me enthusiastically with a hug that I couldn't help returning. As much as I might shy away from the random embrace, Sue's affection was different somehow. Real. I thought she was a genuinely good person. And I didn't think that about many people.

She pulled me inside. "Sit down, sit down," she ordered, pushing me onto the sofa and handing me a plate of fry bread.

"I'm such a jerk. I didn't remember to bring you anything," I apologized. This detecting would probably go much better if I could ply my subjects with tempting sweets.

"Hush. I'm happy that I just get to see you again. You don't come around often enough."

I felt a pang of guilt. Charlie had implied the same thing. But I wasn't sure how to go about remedying the problem. Forks was far enough away from Seattle that it wasn't convenient to just pop in for an hour or two and then go. It made more sense to come down for extended stays, but socialization was easier for me in short doses, with long breaks in between. An extended weekend of conviviality was well beyond my means.

I gave a weak smile and said I would try to come home more often. I spent the next thirty minutes asking questions about the res and her family. I wasn't pretending to be nice per se. I liked Sue. But I wanted something from her. That made my actions a little disingenuous, didn't it? I asked the expected questions. _How was Leah?_ That bitch. _And what about Billy Black? _Because heaven knew my father wouldn't tell me._ What about Sue's women's group?_

When all of the expected topics had been covered, and I'd said a thing or two about my teaching and had even told her about the gallery showing, I got down to business.

"Sue, do you remember ten years ago when Tanya Denali was killed in Port Angeles?" I asked, feeling guilty for having to bring the subject up.

She made a face and shuddered. "As if I could forget. It was awful. I know every generation says this, but stuff like that just didn't happen around here when I was growing up. I worry about the children of the future."

"Well I've been thinking about it for some reason." I didn't think that I should mention Edward's interest. "I can't help wondering if they made a mistake."

"Made a mistake?"

"They never caught the killer. And they were so sure it was that guy I went to school with. But I was the one who gave him his alibi. Remember? Because I saw him at the top of the blue trail at the same time Tanya was killed."

"Do you think that you made a mistake?"

"No. It was really him. But I didn't have a watch on me. I know for a fact that the sun was setting as I walked back to my truck. It was so dark that I fell once or twice. And it was definitely dark by the time I made it to my truck. I double-checked when sunset happened that day. It was at 9:07 pm. Doesn't it stay light for a couple of hours after that though? If it was later than I thought, maybe that guy did kill her and I gave him an alibi. I'd check for myself today, but it's October, and you know Tanya was killed in July."

"Honey, I'm sure you didn't do anything wrong. Where was your truck?"

I told her the name of the turnoff.

"Henry and I used to go up here—parking," she blushed, "all the time. In the middle of the summer, too. It gets dark there pretty fast, with the mountain and the trees. You don't have anything to worry about."

"You're not just trying to make me feel better?"

"I wouldn't lie to you. You know what? I'll ask Leah."

"Leah?" I crinkled my nose.

"She's a forest ranger."

I bet she busted all of the squirrels' nuts too.

Sue called Leah and asked her to stop by. I apologized for inconveniencing Sue (_fuck inconveniencing Leah_). She said it was no problem, and, while we were waiting for Leah, showed me a baby blanket that she was working on for Sam and Emily's first child.

Leah was none too pleased to see me. "What the hell do you want?" she growled when she saw me. _And to think that people think I'm a bitch,_ I thought.

"Be nice," her mother warned.

I explained my concerns, feeling somewhat more wary about doing so now that I was dealing with Sue's daughter.

"Mom's right," she said. "The alibi's solid. But I don't see why you care. That whole crowd was bad news."

It felt strange having to defend myself. Leah wasn't saying anything that I hadn't already said to Edward. "I just don't like that someone got away with murder."

"It's not like the girl who got killed was someone from the res." Leah didn't bother filtering her thoughts, which probably had something to do with the fact that Sue had left to go into the kitchen.

"It could have been."

She flicked her fingers. "Cullen might not have killed her, but I bet you it was someone from the same crowd."

"I didn't like any of them either but it's not like I can just go around making accusations."

"You want an accusation? Here's one. That asshat Cullen and his two friends. They were always coming down to First Beach and starting shit, pretending to look for that fucking pirate gold, which, if it is here, clearly belongs to us, not some asshats who don't know how to show respect when they're on someone else's land. Especially that creep James. He was the worst. I thought it was bad enough when it was just him and Cullen and that butt-buddy of theirs, but the three of them were nothing compared to James and that girl he started bringing around."

"What girl?" I asked, trying to remember if I knew her.

"I don't know. She wasn't from Forks. I'd never seen her before, and I never saw her after that summer either. Black Irish. I shouldn't even have called her a 'girl.' She looked _aged_, like she'd been ridden hard and hung up wet. She was always drinking on the beach and smoking her fucking cigarettes. Goading James into starting fights. She kept giving cigarettes and beers to the younger kids, like Claire, when Claire was only like ten."

"Do you remember her name?" I couldn't recall the woman Leah was describing.

"Mary or something like that. I figured that James had hooked up with her as a substitute for the Wonder Twins, because Cullen and his other little friend stopped showing up around the same time that she came on the scene. We finally told James that if he came back we'd kick his ass."

"It got that bad?"

"The last straw was him and that bitch screwing around on top of the cliffs. They convinced Jared to dive off. Thank God Sam just happened to be walking across the beach when it happened. Jared hit his head on a rock on the way down and broke a leg. Sam saved his life."

Christ. "I had no idea."

"No one gives a shit what happens on the res. Except when it will make them look good or they can use us to sell something. Otherwise, we don't exist."

"That's stupid."

"Yeah, well, what you going to do? We made sure that James and his slut knew they weren't welcome back in La Push and that was that."

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Before leaving, I made Quil take me to the garage to see Embry. I asked them both if they remembered the party on First Beach. They did, of course, because Tanya's murder had been such a big deal. But they didn't remember anyone acting strangely (other than Eric getting stabbed later that night) and they didn't know the Forks crowd well enough to know whether or not someone was missing from the party. They were sure, however, that everyone from La Push—at least those of a certain age—were not only at the party but had stayed the whole time. I asked them to make a few inquiries on my behalf. Jared and Paul would certainly be more willing to answer questions coming from Quil or Embry than me, and maybe they had remembered something that they'd somehow forgotten to mention to the police ten years ago.

Quil dropped me off at the diner in Forks, where I joined Edward at a booth and he updated me on his activities of the previous evening.

Edward had gotten ahold of Mike Newton and taken him to a bar in Port Angeles, for old time's sake, on the pretense that two guys who'd fucked Tanya Denali ought to be able to commiserate over the fact ten years later. It seemed that Mike was not aware that his own father was a founding member of the club, and indeed, Edward saved that little tidbit until the end of the evening after, of course, having gotten Mike so drunk that the poor guy was just answering questions left and right.

_Where was Mike's father the night of Tanya's death?_ At _The Lodge_, of all places, at a Rotary Club meeting.

_Forks had a Rotary Club? _Yep, and the guy who ran the grocery store also happened to be a member of both the _Guys who Fucked Tanya Denali Club_ and the Rotary Club.

Before coming to the diner to meet me, Edward had stopped in at the grocery store. Unfortunately, he hadn't learned much of use and was no longer welcome on the premises.

Undaunted, Edward had stopped at the gas station as well, to see if anyone remembered the attendant who'd supposedly fucked Tanya in a port-a-potty. The employees of the gas station were more amenable to Edward's questions than those of the grocery store, but no one had worked there for more than five years, so Edward was going to put his PI on it.

If I had a PI, I'd put him on things too, like finding me more books to read and other fickle pursuits that I didn't think that Edward would care to hear.

I too had made great strides in the investigation. I told Edward that I had confirmed the whole issue surrounding his alibi and the timing of sunset (I left out the part about Leah referring to Jasper as Edward's "butt-buddy") and we decided that we didn't need to go out to verify the timing ourselves because it was the wrong time of year anyhow.

Edward thanked me, in a voice dripping with no small amount of sarcasm, for confirming an alibi that I myself had provided.

Then I showed him the pictures that I'd taken that morning with my cell phone of the photographs of First Beach that I'd found in my father's files. I thought that would shut him up, but no.

"You should have just borrowed the pictures from the file," he said. "If you go back and get it now, we can get them photocopied."

"I'm not going back through that file. The pictures I took with my phone are just fine."

Edward texted the pictures to himself and returned my phone. "You know that I can hardly make out any details in those pictures."

"I'm sure you already have a computer hacker with blue hair on speed-dial who can blow them up for you while _Prodigy _plays in the background. I thought they would make you happy. It's photographic proof that all of your little friends really were at that party on First Beach when Tanya was killed." The pictures had been taken from up on one of the cliffs and showcased the scene down on the beach. A typical party, with the makings of a bonfire and far too many red cups for a crowd where no one was over the age of twenty-one. The pictures had been attached to a list of everyone who'd been identified from the pictures. James What's-his-name, that dick Newton, his slut girlfriend, the whore with the hair, Maybe-not-a-bitch Leah, Paul, Sam, Jared, Kim and a host of others from Forks and La Push. Even Edward's favorite suspect: Eric. If the time stamp on the photos wasn't proof enough, the angle of the sun in most of the shots surely was. The pictures had been taken at the very time that someone was seen picking Tanya up in Port Angeles.

None of this seemed to impress Edward. He was just being difficult. "If you will recall," he reminded me, "you are the one who doubted that a party on First Beach qualified as a valid alibi."

"Just because your friends had an alibi doesn't mean that they weren't involved. If anything, it makes them even more suspicious. If I was going to kill someone, I'd make sure that I had an alibi too."

"Don't call them my friends."

I ignored Edward and continued to point out the obvious. "Isn't it convenient that that these pictures were taken right then? With all of them in it?" I had a burst of inspiration. "What if they were all in on it together? Maybe Tanya was blackmailing them with something. Like pictures of an orgy. They could have all pitched in to rent the car from out of state." I thought for a minute. "Oh! Maybe she found that pirate gold that's supposed to be hidden in a cave somewhere. They're waiting to come forward about the find because they don't want anyone to connect their discovery with Tanya's death. There could be chests of gold bullion just waiting to flood the market. We have to find out what all of your little friends have been doing since graduation."

"Pirate gold?"

"It's a thing."

"Only in those novels you study," he waved a dismissive hand.

I was astounded. "Pirate gold is much more than a fictive device. It represents the underbelly of a mercantile system that enslaved the proletariat in ways that were only slightly less criminal than—"

Sadly, my discourse on the dehumanizing effects of the early American-European economy was interrupted by a shriek.

"_Oh my God, Edward Cullen!" _

And right like that, I was back in high school. My heart stopped beating for a full two seconds with the shock of the moment. The past and the present colliding as the space-time continuum collapsed.

Regaining my senses, I looked at the waitress who'd interrupted us, but didn't recognize her.

"I can't believe you're back!" she shrieked some more.

Edward stared at her blankly, clearly not recognizing her either.

"It's me," she announced, throwing her arms wide. Her smile started to fade. "Jessica Stanley."

"Oh," Edward furrowed his brow, still looking confused. "Hello."

Jessica didn't seem bothered by his lapse in memory and glanced at me. "Who are you?"

"No one," I grinned back, giddy with the absurdity of the situation.

"It's Bella," Edward corrected, gesturing to me.

"Who?"

"Bella," he repeated more slowly. "_Isa_bella."

"Izzy," I helped.

She gazed at me for a minute more. "Ohhhh."

Wait for it.

"What are you doing with Edward?"

"Hey—" Edward started.

"It's a mentoring thing," I interrupted. "Like Big Brothers, to give people like me a chance at a real life."

Jessica stared back at me, confused.

"He lost a bet," I said instead.

"Oh, that sucks," she intoned, lamenting Edward's sad fate: A lunch in public with the likes of me.

"I know, right?" I commiserated. "But Edward was just telling me how much he wishes he hadn't fallen out of touch with the Forks crowd. He wishes that he knew what everyone was up to."

"I can totally help you with that," Jessica said, spinning around to face Edward.

"Are you free soon?" I asked, pulling my legs out of the range of Edward's feet. _That hurt._

"I have a break coming up, like, right now," she replied, still gazing at Edward.

"Awesome," I chirped.

She sneered at me. "You're not going to be hanging around too, are you?"

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Knowing that Edward would get a lot more out of Jessica without me there to muck up the works, I decided to leave him to his own devices. I couldn't help laughing at his expression of misery as I waved goodbye.

Left on my own for a while, I decided to wander through Forks' financial district, which was all of three blocks, to see what had changed since I'd last roared through town.

Turned out that, aside from _Hale's Upholstery _now being _Hale and Son's Upholstery_, nothing much had changed.

I checked out the square of grass behind _The Lodge_ where there used to be a payphone, the very payphone from which an anonymous tip had called in the location of Tanya's corpse the night of her murder. I even checked out various vantage points around the parking lot to see if the payphone would have been visible to passersby. It was a pretty obscure location, surrounded by brick walls forming the backs of other businesses and a dirty alley. Stupid place for a payphone anyhow. A person was just asking to get raped stopping there.

Stepping back out on the street, I spied the sign for _Newton's Outfitters_. I texted Edward to tell him to pick me up there when he finished (unless he and Stanley decided just to get a room—in which case, I said that I was more than happy to hitch a ride back to my dad's), and went inside.

It was exactly the same. Several racks of fishing supplies. Walls covered in guns. A dirty glass case filled with hunting knives.

Yeah, probably shouldn't say anything about the whole vegetarian thing in here.

"Can I help you?"

I had accidentally backed into a soft wall of—moist softness. "Sorry," I apologized. "Didn't see you there."

"No problem," my newfound friend huffed back at me, a flop of blond hair covering his sweaty brow. "Pretty light on my feet." He did a little dance step.

"I can see that," I said. He _had _snuck up on me after all.

"So what you looking for?"

"I don't know." I scanned the shop again. "I live alone in the city. I was thinking that I needed something for self-defense. Maybe a baseball bat." Why shouldn't I sieze the opportunity to practice my skills at subterfuge? I did live alone, after all. So that part was true.

I wondered if this what everyone else did all of the time. Making random conversation with perfect strangers.

"A baseball bat ain't going to do you any good if someone breaks into your place."

"Well, I'm just not sure that I can handle all of—" I waved a hand in a vague sort of way "—this."

"That's just 'cause all those liberals got you brainwashed into thinking a gun's a live snake." He swished his hand in the air, as if reenacting a cobra strike.

"I don't think I should own a gun. The temptation to shoot someone would be just too high. I have an awful lot of enemies."

He guffawed. "That's a good one. You're funny."

I was the life of the freaking party.

The salesman shuffled over to the display case. "Our merchandise is more than suitable to a woman with your needs. In fact, I am sure that we have more than enough to leave you feeling satisfied. Other outfitters will try to set you up with a blade that's too short. Or too weak. Just doesn't have the stamina to stay the course and bring you all the way to the end. But we guarantee all of our purchases. Our knives are long and strong and heat resistant. And they can work in wet conditions too. The wetter the better. You can just keep thrusting our knives as fast and as hard as you want until you're satisfied."

Oookay. I was sure that he didn't mean what I thought he meant. I didn't get hit on. Except by Quil and Embry. And then only as a proxy in their not so secret bromance.

He unlocked the back of the case and pulled out a knife. "Just look at this puppy. Japanese steel. A Russian knife expert designed it and is marketing it through us in an exclusive deal."

A Russian expert had come to Forks of all places to sell his exclusive Japanese knife?

"And I can offer it to you today for the very low price of three hundred dollars."

My eyes nearly popped out of my head. "That is a bit more than I meant to spend."

"You can't put a price on your well-being."

"You're probably right, but—" I frowned at the item in question. "I wouldn't know how to use this."

"It's very easy. Why I have skinned probably twenty deer with this very knife. It is of the very finest quality, as I'm sure you'll find." He held it out towards me.

"I don't—okay."

He slipped it into my palm. I held it out awkwardly to the side, then put it down on the counter again.

"Now what you want to do," he came around the counter and stood behind me. "Is put your weight on your back hip, like this." He pulled on my hip.

_I don't think so._

I started to step away, but he kept his grip on my hip. "And you want to put your left arm up, like this." He grabbed my wrist.

"Yeah I don't think that's going to work," I tried to pull away.

"Relax. Loosen up."

"Get—"

The jangling of the bell on the front door interrupted us.

"What the hell are you doing with my girlfriend?" Edward snarled. And cue another descent into the absurd theater that was now my life. Was there a camera hidden somewhere?

Meat hooks suddenly dropped me and moved away. _Damn right, asshole. _Not that I needed Edward to save me._ Had him right where I wanted him_, I thought, rubbing my wrist.

"Sorry dude, I was just showing her the knife," dickhead said, holding his hands up.

"You better not be talking about something inside your pants," Edward growled.

What the fuck? Okay, now I knew for a fact that there was a camera hidden somewhere because this wasn't really happening.

Alarmed, I stepped between them. "It was a real knife. A real knife. Which I don't want. Thanks anyways." I pushed Edward out of the shop.

"You know the conviction rate for rape would be a lot higher if women would stop trying to protect their attackers," Edward chastised me as we walked to his car.

"You know if women stopped running interference between combative men the human species as a whole would cease to exist," I told him, shuddering at the memory of the dickhead's sweaty hand on my wrist but still not quite able to deal with Edward's behavior either.

"I still can't believe that's Newton," Edward said shaking his head as he opened the passenger door of his Porsche for me. He was overly fond of opening doors for me, a habit that irked me to no end. It had led to more than one race between us to see who could reach the door first. As he had a car lock control on his keychain, he had the upper hand. For now.

"_That's_ Newton?"

"Yeah. Why won't you let me open your door?"

"I don't want to encourage your attempts at chivalry."

"Is it everyone's attempts at chivalry or just mine?"

"Just yours," I said, getting into the car. "I don't want you thinking you're a good person."

Not taking the bait, Edward changed the subject. "What were you doing in _Newton's Outfitters_?" he asked, sliding behind the steering wheel.

"I was investigating."

"It doesn't look like you got very far in your interrogation."

"Did I or did I not find photos of a certain party on First Beach this morning?" I didn't want to talk about Mike. Or about why Edward had told Mike that he was my boyfriend. Only one other person had ever played the hero like that for me before—Seth, and I secretly thought that Seth was just jealous that the prick was hitting on me and not him.

"My apologies."

"Shouldn't I question him myself?"

"I've already questioned him. Numerous times. He doesn't know anything that we don't."

"I thought the whole point was to get _me_ asking the questions."

"I don't want you anywhere near him. Besides, I notice that you didn't make any effort to give Jessica the third degree."

"Oh, I think your approach was far more effective with her. What did the idiot have to say?"

"Nothing new. They were all on First Beach partying. They all loved Tanya. They all thought that I'd done it. And no one has made it big recently with a sudden discovery of pirate gold." He shook his head. "Strange—getting hit on by someone who suspects you of murder. By the way, I'm going to get you back for abandoning me like that."

"Bullshit. That was a strategic investigative decision. And if you think that's strange, you've clearly never read any actual Gothic literature. Heroines are only interested in a man once they've begun to suspect him of murder. It reflects either the suppression of the female libido or their low self-esteem, depending on your perspective."

"She groped me. No comment on the female libido."

I couldn't help laughing.

Edward snorted. "I save you from getting molested by Mike Newton and you think it's funny that I got groped by Jessica Stanley."

"You're right," I tried to stop laughing. "I'm sorry."

"This is very sexist of you."

"I'm hungry. If you'll recall, I got thrown out of the diner before I had lunch. I'm too light-headed to think rationally." This was technically a lie. Sue's fry bread was very filling.

"Well, you can get something at my place."

His place. I was going to Edward's place. I felt like Alice in Wonderland.

_Off with her head!_

On the way to _The Cullen Manse_, as I decided to call it (Edward did not care for this appellation), Edward filled me in on the gossip. Lauren—"Who?" I asked. Edward provided a physical description. "Oh, the bitch with the hair."—Lauren (the bitch with the hair) was in Dallas running a beauty salon (Dallas—the hair—it made perfect sense). Edward continued naming people that I only vaguely recalled.

"Wait," I interrupted. "What about James?"

Edward didn't answer.

"She doesn't know where he went?"

Edward still didn't reply.

"He's not dead is he? Fuck—"

"No, he's in jail," Edward finally clarified.

"Jail? What the hell is he in jail for?"

"Drug possession with an intention to distribute."

"Hmm. Can't say I'm surprised. I wonder why dad didn't mention it."

"He wasn't arrested here."

"I'm sure Jessica loved telling that one. What a gossiping hag."

"Jessica didn't tell me. I already knew."

"'Cause he was your friend." It troubled me that I kept saying things to Edward that were inadvertently assholish. If I was going to be an asshole, I wanted it to be intentional.

"Actually, I'm the one who got him arrested."

**AN: REVIEWERS RECEIVE ANOTHER OUTTAKE FROM BELLA'S GRAD SCHOOL YEARS.**

**And before you flame me, I don't think waitresses or retail workers are stupid. But I do think that bullies who don't grow up come damn close. And I've been just as mean, if not meaner, to doctors in this story.**

**Rec: Reality and Other Inconveniences by OhMyWord **Edward's body was close, too close for sensible thought on my part. He watched me like he was waiting for an opening, my own personal loosening of morals. Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance/Friendship - Chapters: 31 - Words: 74,251 - Reviews: 962 - Favs: 992 - Follows: 482 - Updated: Mar 10, 2010 - Published: Aug 6, 2009 - Bella, Edward - Complete


	14. Chapter 14

**Thank you to everyone who supported this story, nominating it for the Top Five Favorite Fic Dive stories for the month of November at A Different Forest! **

**Thank you to Rochelle Alison for the recommendation!**

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 11

'"_I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil."_

"_Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?"'_

_Jane Austen_

BPOV

_Last time in _Gothic, _Edward Cullen was conveying Ms. Swan to the family manse when the subject of one James Hunter was raised in conversation._

"You got James arrested?" I asked.

"Well, you know we went to college together," Edward started to explain, his tone suddenly harsh.

"No I didn't know."

"We did. Except I guess that James couldn't really afford the tuition." Edward hit the steering wheel. His sudden display of anger was taking me by surprise. "Which doesn't make sense because he had a scholarship and if that had fallen through then he could have just taken out loans. But junior year of college, I realize that one of my best friends is dealing drugs."

I didn't know what to say.

"And not just marijuana, either," Edward continued. "Hardcore shit. And then it turns out that he's keeping some of that stuff in our apartment. _Our _apartment."

I felt a surge of speed as Edward pressed on the gas.

"He was always having these wild parties and his girlfriend, Maria, was there _all_ of the time. Bitch had fucking followed us from Forks. I told him he needed to get his shit together. We were in school, for Christ's sake. If he hadn't been partying all of the time, he wouldn't have lost his scholarship in the first place. So anyway, when the campus cops bust him, do you know what he does?"

I had never seen Edward this agitated.

"He tries to pin that shit on me and he gets away with it. Fortunately, they just give me a slap on the wrist because they haven't got any real evidence. So I ask James what the fuck he thinks he's doing, and he tells me that I got off once so why not again. Can you believe that?"

Yes. I believed it. James was a monster to me in high school.

Edward snorted. "He is using our apartment to deal drugs and thinks that I'm going to take the fall for him. You're damn right I turned him in. His bitch girlfriend even attacked me. I could have pressed charges but I didn't. And yet _I'_m the asshole. James got out of jail after a while, but went right back in less than a month later for the same thing. They must have had other stuff on him, though, because he still hasn't gotten out."

We were doing almost twenty over the speed limit.

"Please slow down," I begged, gripping my seatbelt.

"What?"

"Slow down."

"Oh." Edward eased up off the gas. "Sorry."

"Do you still talk to James?" I asked uncertainly, wary of upsetting him further.

"That would be a _No_."

"He never apologized?"

"According to him, he did nothing wrong. I'm the one who let him down."

"What a dick," I commiserated, one eye on the speedometer. It seemed strange to me that I was comforting Edward for the treatment that he'd received at the hands of James, when I was the one who used to be on the receiving end of their bullshit. I didn't understand quite what that meant, if anything at all. So I decided to ignore the implications and proceed. _Onto the breech_ and all that.

"Yep."

Edward seemed to have gained control of his temper, so I hazarded a question. "James did have a grudge against you then. If you knew that, why didn't you suspect him for Tanya's murder?"

"He has a grudge _now_. We were best friends when Tanya died."

"And you think this two-faced shit just showed up over night?" I was surprised at Edward's gullibility.

"It took him three years. And he was a drug dealer by then. He changed."

"People don't really change that much."

"Yes they do. _I_'ve changed."

I chose not to comment on that.

"And Alice and Jasper have changed," he added.

My head whipped in his direction. "Alice hasn't changed," I told him with a note of warning in my voice.

He glanced at me, a cautious expression on his face. "Well Jasper has."

I hmmphed.

"You don't think he's changed?" Edward asked.

"He seems the same to me."

"You don't like him."

"Should I?"

"There's no gun to your head."

"He's dating Alice, not me."

"He has some positive qualities."

"If you say so."

"He's got that southern gentleman thing going for him. I thought all women went crazy for that."

"Do I look like a sheep? Running with the herd?" _Southern gentleman_ my ass. But of course I had no intention of admitting the real problem with Jasper, so as per usual, I deflected. "Actually, do you know who looks like a sheep? Jasper. His hair is poofy."

Edward laughed. "What is it with you and Texan hair? You said the same thing about Lauren."

"Did I?" I did.

"I think you're jealous."

"Jealous?"

"Because you live somewhere rainy. You can't get big hair."

"I like flat hair."

Edward laughed some more. "You're prejudiced against southerners."

"I'm equally prejudiced against northerners. I hate everyone equally."

"You _live _in the north and you don't hate flat-haired people."

"I hate flat-haired people who don't wash their hair. And of course I live in the north. Do you know how sunny it is in the south? How warm? There're places where it hardly ever rains and there's just the big open country with no trees to hide you."

"Hide you?"

"You know, from people and things. I don't like to be seen by just anyone."

Edward just shook his head, wisely deciding to drop the subject.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward offered me a "snack" when we got to his house, like we were there to work on an afterschool group project. I had to confess that I wasn't hungry, and he kindly refrained from pointing out the evidence of my earlier deception.

He gave me a tour. I kept my hands clasped together and was careful to stand at least two feet away from the walls.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I don't want a guard to come out and yell at me for touching the art work."

He rolled his eyes and showed me the library, the sight of which, I had to confess to myself, was more than a little unexpected. _Fuck rich people._

"You like it," he observed.

"I _love _it," I admitted, my envy overshadowed for the moment by my appreciation for the sheer pageantry of it. I waved my fingers in front of the gleaming green and red bindings, my skin tingling with the desire to touch. A ladder on runners provided access to the volumes at the top. I imagined holding on to the rails of the ladder and flying around the stacks. What dizzying heights.

Edward chuckled. "I can see that."

"You know, they say that a woman gets _ravished_ but that she is also _ravishing_, like it's her fault," I said wistfully.

"What?"

"There are just so many. A person could hardly be blamed. She'd just say that she couldn't help herself. She _had_ to ravish them because they were so _ravishing._"

"I'm pretty sure that my parents will let you borrow any book that you want to read."

Foolish boy. "I don't want to read them, I want to marry them." I spun around, taking it all in. _Whoever married Edward would have a right to this library_. It wasn't fair.

"I'd ask if you want me to leave you alone, but you're actually kind of scaring me right now."

"They're all medical books, right? Or post-1950 Americana. Tell me that they're all boring and not in the least bit desirable. All about flower arranging or toy train design."

"I think it's a little bit of everything, actually. Do you want to take a closer look?"

I forced myself to exercise some restraint. "No. It would be too much. I should go." I started towards the door, my head turned over my shoulder to keep the books in view for as long as possible. Edward followed me. I shut the door behind him.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm fine." I was okay now that the pretty pretty pretty books were locked away where I couldn't see them. I would just pretend that it was a dream. A nice little dream where I lived in a library and sat in a window seat reading books all day.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Esme and Carlisle Cullen were two of the nicest people I had ever met. Esme was so courteous that, were it not for the fiery locks that graced the scalps of mother and son alike, I would never have believed her capable of producing the creature who'd once made my life so miserable. And while Edward didn't have his father's blond hair, he certainly had his jaw, so one couldn't even take refuge in speculating the interference of some demonic spirit a la _Rosemary's Baby_.

I considered the possibility that the Cullens' exquisite deportment might be a sham, and that every sabbat they indeed danced naked in the graveyard after sacrificing virgins to the great god Pan, but I could see no evidence of it myself, unless such perfection of form and manner was in and of itself suspect. That was probably explanation enough: The gratuitous accumulation of beauty and accomplishments mounting until the point of perversion. Thus, Edward.

"You're so sweet," I said to Esme.

"Nonsense," she replied. "I'm just happy to see that Edward's making time for friends now. He is always so busy working. Never comes home any more. I keep telling him that he needs to find a wife and settle down." She cocked an eyebrow at me.

Cue the awkward.

"What about you Bella," Esme continued, "seeing anyone?"

"Mom, enough already," Edward complained.

"No, not really," I answered lightly, because I had long since learned that carefree ambiguity was much better than a heartfelt _no, not going to happen, not ever_. For the latter always sparked too many questions, like _Why not? _and _Don't you know that the right guy is out there waiting for you?_ and my personal favorite _Don't you want to have children? _Because for some reason, no one thinks it's rude to remind a woman of all of the ways in which society considers her a failure.

"Have you seen the library?" Carlisle generously changed the subject.

"Yes," I smiled, sitting up straighter.

Edward laughed. "Be careful. I think she wants to move in."

Could I move in? No. _It would be so decadent_. I wasn't a hedonist.

"You're the only people I know who own more books than me," I complimented them.

"We try," Esme smirked. "But some of those were passed down."

I sighed. I might not want to _live_ in the eighteenth century, but I would take its books any day.

Dinner was delicious. I had told Edward not to bother his mother with preparing something vegetarian. I would just eat sides. He'd ignored me, annoying me again with a bullshit show of concern for my wellbeing, and Esme served pumpkin gnocci and squash soup, which was basically food porn to me. It was also surprisingly easy to chitchat with her about recipes, and while I didn't know anything about the interior design that seemed to occupy most of her time, a mutual love of seventeenth and eighteenth century art provided enough fodder to keep us occupied while Edward and his father entertained themselves with hospital gossip and the like.

I had expected dinner with Edward's parents to be such an onerous ordeal. It only made sense that guy who'd made high school a living hell would have assholes for parents. Maybe they were just so oblivious that they never realized what kind of man their son was. They didn't even bat an eye when Edward introduced me, which was odd considering that I was the reason that their son wasn't prosecuted for murder. It occurred to me that Edward might have warned them to play nice, but I still thought it was a little strange. What did they think was going on? That we'd accidentally met in Seattle and were now buddy-buddy? Didn't they realize how crazy that sounded? A social reject and the Homecoming King didn't just become best friends over night.

I was probably overthinking this. No doubt they had rules, too, and acknowledging the peculiarity of the situation would give it a credence that they didn't want it to have.

Regardless, they'd been so nice, and the conversation so easy, that I felt like a tool for raising the issue of the murder. I'd no choice though. I wasn't here as Edward's friend. I was here to ask them questions about Tanya.

And that's when I realized that the problem wasn't the disparity between my station and theirs, it was their unwillingness to acknowledge the decade-old incident that had linked their son to me.

"I just don't see why you can't let this go," Esme complained to Edward when I ventured to ask them if they had any lingering suspicions about who might have done it.

"It's not him, it's me," I lied, as I knew Edward hoped I would. "People still look at me with suspicion in their eyes. And I can't help feeling uncomfortable whenever I come back to Forks or go to Port Angeles, wondering if the killer's still there, watching me."

"I'm sorry, but I don't see what we can do to help," Carlisle said.

I shared a glance with Edward. "We were wondering if maybe someone had a grudge against you." I felt like a jerk. "Or against Edward. I mean, whoever did this clearly hated him. He was set up. But they had to know him too. How else could they have arranged everything?"

Carlisle shook his head. "They got the right car and the right hair color. How well did they have to know Edward for that?"

"They had to know him well enough to be really angry at him."

"I thought all of this was over," Esme sighed. "Now you've just dragged Isabella into this all over again."

"I promise, if I don't get anywhere this time, it's over. I promise," Edward replied.

"Do you really mean it?" Carlisle demanded.

"I do." Edward nodded.

Esme and Carlisle gazed at him for a moment. Seemingly convinced, they resigned themselves to the situation.

"So what do you want from us?" Esme asked.

"Can you think of anyone who had a grudge against your family?" I inquired.

"Who would want to hurt us like that?" Carlisle demanded.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe someone in your past. Before Edward was even born."

"That's crazy. Who would wait that long to get revenge? And _revenge_? This isn't _Dallas_."

I shrugged. It sounded ridiculous to me too. "If you can't think of anyone then at least we'll know that we covered all of our bases. Was there ever anyone in your life who seemed violent or a little off? They say serial killers always seem so nice."

Of course, by that standard, Sue Clearwater was putting arsenic in her cookies.

I looked at Carlisle. "You had to have had a few patients that were a trifle _unique_."

"If I did, I certainly couldn't say anything to you about it."

I supposed that was true.

Esme shook her head. "I'm sorry. I want to help. But there's really nothing to tell."

I wasn't willing to give up so easily. "Maybe an old boyfriend?" I guessed, remembering Edward's theory about the waitress' brother. "Someone who was angry that you married Carlisle?" I could see it now—a declaration of undying passion and a vow of revenge flung just as the newly married pair fled the church.

"You're not serious."

"Someone with a temper? I mean, maybe he never hit you, but you thought he could."

Esme glanced at Carlisle, who had crossed his arms. Clucking her tongue, she looked back at Edward. "Do you _promise_ that this is the last time we are going to hear about this?"

"I promise."

She turned towards me. "My first fiancé—"

"You don't have to do this," Carlisle tried to stop her.

"It's worth it if he promises to stop this," Esme explained, her voice pleading. She started again, "My first fiancé's name was Charles. He was violent sometimes. I was stupid and young. I didn't realize just what kind of a man he was until my sister—I never told you about her Edward, I didn't like to talk about it. But you look so much like her that it still hurts sometimes to look at you. Elizabeth confessed to me that she'd had an affair with Charles. I was so brokenhearted. I couldn't believe that the two of them could betray me like that." Esme closed her eyes and shuddered. "In any case, I—got away. I moved to Seattle and didn't hear from my sister after that. I'd cut ties with Charles completely of course, but she was still family. The only family I had left at that point. Our parents had died in a car accident when I was just eighteen and Elizabeth was nineteen. About a year after I left, the police contacted me. They'd found my address on a letter in Elizabeth's purse. She had died giving birth to a daughter. I asked about the baby but she was already gone. Charles had taken her and vanished. I paid for Elizabeth's funeral but I couldn't afford to do anything more about it then. When I married Carlisle, we hired a private investigator to look for the girl. I would have fought Charles for her. I had hospital records to prove to the court what kind of man he was. I would have taken Elizabeth's daughter in and raised her as my own. But the detective didn't have any success. Charles was a horrible man. He hasn't any right to bear a grudge against me. I didn't do anything to him except leave. Unfortunately, that would be enough for a man like him."

Carlisle had moved next to Esme and was holding her hand.

"I have a dead aunt I never knew about? And a cousin? Mom, why didn't you tell me about this before?" Edward asked.

"There was nothing to tell. All that was in the past. It's not part of my life now. And it hurt too much to remember."

Carlisle interjected. "And anyhow, Charles didn't kill Tanya."

"How do you know?" Edward demanded.

"Because he wouldn't have stopped there. He would have kept on going until our lives were completely destroyed."

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward had agreed that we would take turns driving for the trip back to Seattle, but refused to hand over the keys when it was my turn. Dinner with his parents had agitated him more than I'd realized at first. I wasn't sure if it was the stress of hearing his mother's confession or just being back in Forks or the culmination of everything.

"Driving helps calm my nerves," he said.

"Slow down then," I ordered.

He slowed down.

I was wary to say anything that might upset Edward, but I didn't like the silence. "So what do you think?"

"I think that I'm going to get my detective to find that piece of shit who fucked with my mother."

I thought about that. It seemed to me that Carlisle was right. Charles Masen wouldn't have stopped with just killing Tanya.

Yet I didn't think that Edward would be open to that line of reasoning right at present.

"Maybe it _was _a serial killer," I speculated. "Don't they say that stuff like this takes practice? If this was really someone's first murder, wouldn't it have been messier?"

"I've seen the autopsy results. An amateur could very easily have done it."

"Still, exsanguination isn't exactly the normal way you'd expect someone to kill a person. That kind of murder suggests a real pathology," I said, talking out of my ass. When had I gotten a psych degree?

But it seemed to make sense. Crazy as I was, not even I would want to bleed someone to death. I'd just kill them. Finish it quick.

The thought filled me with revulsion. I never wanted to hate someone that much.

I explained myself. "You would think that they would feel a compulsion to repeat themselves."

"They could be killing animals. They could have started out with animals, too, and gone back to animals after Tanya. As long as they're getting rid of the bodies, no one would know."

Grisly as that sounded, I supposed it was true. The possibilities really were endless.

I said, "Maybe they went to Canada or the Philippines," naming countries at random, "and they're killing people there but no one's connected it back to Port Angeles yet."

"Well if we track down any suspects who went out of the country, we can contact the authorities there."

"Contact the authorities there?"

"Yeah." Edward glanced at me, his face dim in the dashboard lights. "What?"

"It just sounds so official. So serious."

"It is serious."

I didn't respond. I wondered if Edward was telling his mother the truth when he promised to give the case up if we didn't make any progress.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Three hours later, I was pulling out of Edward's parking lot in my truck, driving home.

The last two days had been surreal, to say the least: I slept in Edward Cullen's bed, babbled like a fucking idiot to him about my fucked up childhood and my mother's fucked up paranormal delusions, visited a cabin in the woods that looked like it was the setting for several of my nightmares, interrogated a no-nonsense restaurant manager, learned that my father might have once suspected me of colluding with a murderer, went through my father's creepy _dead files_, misrepresented myself to Sue in a way that was both shameful and unfair, perhaps bonded with Leah, was reminded of my social place in the class of '04 hierarchy by an ex-classmate, was sexually harassed by a knife salesman/ex-classmate, fell in lust with someone else's library, and witnessed a personal and no doubt embarrassing confession made by a woman whose son had once made my life a living hell.

I was feeling sorry for Edward, and I had no idea what to do with that.

We had agreed as to the next steps. Or rather, Edward had informed me as to what we were expected to do now. He was going to contact his detective with all of the new lines of investigation that he thought we'd devised. I was supposed to ruminate on the case. We were going to touch base in several days.

I didn't hold out much hope for my so-called rumination. To be honest, I hadn't much inclination to ruminate at all. For some reason, the further I drove away from Edward, the more agitated I became.

It was probably just a delayed reaction to stress. I wasn't used to so much excitement. I liked my solitude and was usually careful to arrange long breaks between any taxing social engagements.

And feeling guilty for feeling sorry for someone I hated was certainly taxing.

As long as Edward was around, though, I could shift the focus onto him. Not have to think about how I felt. This was his problem, his project. It had nothing to do with me.

Alone, driving home, I had only myself to worry about. I wanted to go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and forget all about cabins in the woods and old grudges and the awful things that people could do to one another.

In the past, whenever faced with adversity, I had always had my books to fall back on. No matter how bad things got, they had been there for me. Shut everyone else out and hole up on my own, for as long as it took for me to convince myself to come out of hiding. I had been telling Edward the truth when I'd said that horror was an escape—the dread and thrill of terror like the pain and release a person addicted to cutting might feel. There was no real danger. Nothing so appalling that it might follow me back into the waking world from the pages of a book.

I wanted to believe that my usual tactics would work—going home and pulling out my Gilchrist or Stoker, and spending all of Sunday buried in research—except that I was afraid that when I got home and tried to go to sleep, I'd close my eyes and see blood pooling on the floor of a cabin and morgue photos and Edward's grinning face from ten years ago morphing into the more somber countenance he seemed to bear these days and then morphing back again, my discomfort with having to confront so many memories being bound up with a bundle of repressed anxiety and hostility, fueled also by a sense of disgust that was probably some primal distaste for death. So irrational. So inescapable.

I needed to get a grip. The last two days hadn't been non-stop nightmares and demons. I was letting my imagination get the better of me. It wasn't as if we were any closer to finding out who killed Tanya, so there certainly wasn't a monster lurking in the shadows, waiting to spring for fear that I might disclose his identity.

I needed something to settle my nerves. Not my standard reading, that wouldn't do. Not Gilchrist nor Stoker nor any of the others.

Pausing at a stop sign, I was struck suddenly by the memory of Collin's Betteredge taking out his copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ whenever he felt troubled. _The Moonstone_, I thought, pulling onto my street. Mr. Betteredge and his calm certainty that there was no problem that couldn't be solved with his trusty Crusoe. I would go to bed with Wilkie Collins that night.

This plan was so comforting that I was smiling as I climbed out of my truck and walked up to my door.

It wasn't until I'd reached the step that I saw the dead animal lying in front of the threshold.

**AN: REVIEWERS RECEIVE THE LAST **_**EXCITING**_** OUTTAKE FROM BELLA'S GRAD SCHOOL YEARS!**

**I realized that I made a mistake :( Chapter 4 (chapter 5 per the website's dropdown, chapter 4 per my heading) says that Tanya's **_**parents**_** hired a cross-country runner to check Edward's route to see if he could have made it to Port Angeles to kill her. But later I said that her mother died before the murder occurred. I've fixed the first reference to indicate that Tanya's **_**father**_** hired the runner. My apologies!**

**Rec: Always a Bridesmaid by Missus T **How long can you lust after your best friend's brother before you give up hope? How do you reconcile an attraction for someone you've thought of as a little sister? How long can two people dance around their feelings before they dance together? E/B AH Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance - Chapters: 19 - Words: 85,675 - Reviews: 671 - Favs: 900 - Follows: 547 - Updated: Nov 23, 2011 - Published: Jul 20, 2011 - Bella, Edward - Complete


	15. Chapter 15

**Thank you to everyone who is reading the story! **

**Posting early – happy holidays!**

**Meyer owns all. Except for the theories that you are about to read about who killed Tanya, which were suggested/inspired/correctly surmised(?) by LRK860, WiltshireGlow, JessaCloud, SandPrincess13, roxiegirl, Guest, CindyWindy1, EnchantedbyTwilight, sharkjumper, majose, wonderfullybedazzled, 2old4fanfic (no one is too old!), Capricorn75, JulieToo, nitammi, and KTNCulen (I'm sorry if I missed anyone!).**

Chapter 12

'_Should one of these ghastly figures burst from his confinement, and start up in frightful deformity before me—should the _haggard skeleton_ lift a clattering hand, and point it full in my view—should it open the stiffened jaws, and with a hoarse tremendous murmur break this profound silence—should it accost _me…_' - James Hervey_

BPOV

_Last time in _Gothic, _our pitiable heroine returned home from a stimulating jaunt to her old home of Forks, to discover another poor lifeless creature upon her doorstep. Oh, oh…_

It wasn't road-kill this time.

I stumbled back, clutching my stomach and trying not to vomit. The smell was fetid—that was it, _fetid_, a noxious gas that seemed to fill all of my pores and made my eyes water.

It was nearly midnight. Not the ideal time for such a discovery. _But necromancers always work in the dark._ The image of a graveyard danced across the back of my mind.

There wasn't a back door to my townhouse. I'd no choice but to go through the front. And I couldn't stomach—I wouldn't do it—just stepping over the thing to get into my house. I couldn't bear the notion of that odious gas pouring through the door and into my _home_. My safe haven.

I dropped my suitcase and purse on the sidewalk and found my shovel, the weight of the tool in my hands a comfort. I imagined swinging it at someone, and scanned the darkened street, but there was no one there, and I was being foolish.

Holding my breath, I struggled to maneuver the body off of my step. It was so heavy. I didn't want to inhale, and so I was taking ragged little breaths, almost crying with the stress.

Several minutes later, it was done. The body in the grass, off of the step. I wanted it across the lawn, but it was too heavy to move any further. I dropped the shovel on the grass next to the body and went back for my things.

I held my breath again as I fumbled with the lock, scrambling in my haste, and almost sobbing, with relief this time, when the door opened and I fell through it, slamming it closed as fast as I could and resting against it as I threw the lock.

I could still smell it.

I ran through the house, grabbing air freshner and candles. I sprayed the entryway and lit the wicks, not even considering the danger of mixing the two. I didn't wait around either, stripping my clothes off as I ran to the bathroom, throwing them on the floor and taking a shower, scrubbing my body and washing my hair two times three times again and again to get the scent out, standing there until the water ran cold.

I went back to the entryway and I could still smell it, so I grabbed incense sticks and burned them too. I opened all of the windows in the back of the townhouse and set up fans in the kitchen to direct the air outside. I emptied a can of coffee grounds on the floor. I sprayed the air freshner until the can was empty.

It was a golden retriever.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

My sleep was fitful that night. I waited until seven o'clock the next morning to call my father.

"Why didn't you call me when you got home?" he asked.

"I didn't want to wake up."

"You woke me up anyways. And it's my job to wake up. I'm your father. Did you take a picture of it?"

"I didn't think of it. The dog's still on my lawn."

"You didn't leave it where you found it?"

"No dad. I _couldn't_."

"This is the second time this has happened?"

"Yeah. It was a squirrel last time."

"Anybody else in your neighborhood getting this kind of treatment?"

"I don't know. I don't really talk to any of my neighbors."

"Don't worry about that. The police can take care of it."

"The police?"

"Unless you want me to come up to Seattle myself, you're going to go straight to the police station this morning and report it."

"I don't think this is the sort of thing to bother them about."

"You'll bother about it if I tell you to," my father ordered. "You're going to talk to Jacob."

"Jacob?"

"Jacob Black."

"He's a policeman?"

"I told you. Remember? I said if you ever need help up there—"

"_Little _Jacob Black?"

My father laughed. "Well, I wouldn't call him that if I were you. But yeah, you used to play with him when you were a kid."

"Which precinct?"

"If you ever bothered to listen to me, you would know that it was _your _precinct."

"Jacob Black, the son of my father's best friend, just happens to be a cop in _my_ precinct?"

"I may or may not have pulled some strings."

"Dad!"

"What? That's how these things work Bells. Now get down there. I'll call him and if he's not on shift, I'll make sure he goes in anyhow."

I didn't know what I'd really expected my father to do when I called him—_make everything better_—but this seemed like going overboard. I didn't want to go to a _police station_ and file a complaint. It was so—so much. They would laugh in my face. Even if Jacob was Billy's son.

I knew my father though. There was no way of getting out of it. Perhaps I shouldn't have called him, but I had needed someone to talk to, and not just Seth or Alice either. I had needed someone with actual authority to make the world right again, at least in my own head.

My father made me promise that I would be at the precinct in an hour.

I took another long shower, not bothering with breakfast, and dressed. Then, holding my breath, I sprinted through the entranceway of my townhouse, out of the door and across the lawn to my truck. Even with my head turned to the side, I caught a glimpse of the dirty gold fur swaying in the wind.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Little Jacob Black wasn't so little anymore. And he was happier to see me than I'd expected, grinning at me like I'd just told him that he was going to pitch in the World Series. I had the distinct impression that, were we not at his place of employment, he would have picked me up and swung me around.

I still felt foolish about coming. I was sitting next to his desk where it would be all too easy for someone to overhear us. While the precinct was not buzzing with activity, it wasn't exactly bereft of people either. I leaned towards him and dropped my voice. "I know you probably think this is stupid."

"Hell no. This situation's got the makings of a real serious problem."

I felt my eyes widening in spite of my best efforts to keep myself in check. I needed to be reasonable. I wasn't the kind of person who got stalked.

Jacob held up a hand. "Not that it's going to get that far. We'll nip it in the bud right now."

I swallowed. "How? It's not like this is the sort of thing that's going to attract a lot of attention from your boss. I don't care what my father told you. I can't ask you to go out of your way."

"I'm not going out of my way. It's my job. I'd do it anyhow, you know that."

Except that I didn't know that. I hadn't seen Jacob Black for at least a decade. Why should he be so willing to lend me help? Maybe he was just one of those people you hear about. A good person. Like Sue Clearwater. I told myself not to get my hopes up.

Jacob said, "I'll come by later and install some motion activated lights. There're some other things you can do for security, too."

"That's—thank you."

"No problem. Is there anything else?"

I wanted to ask him. But it was too much.

"What is it?" he pressed.  
>"Will you help me bury the dog?"<p>

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I waited until Jacob had already dug the hole and tipped the dog inside before pointing out that he seemed awfully young to be a detective. He became a trifle defensive—proving, I thought, that my father had had more than a little to do with the promotion than was entirely appropriate—but he smiled when I gave him the apple cake that I'd made to thank him for his efforts. After he left, I called my dad, who corrected my assumption, telling me that during Jacob's second year on the force he had saved a state senator's daughter, who had been attacked by a serial rapist. If anything deserved to be rewarded by rapid acceleration through the ranks, I supposed that did.

A week later, everything had returned to normal. For the most part.

My entryway no longer seemed to reek. Personally, I couldn't escape the sensation of a lingering odor, but in a terrible abuse of friendship, I'd invited Alice and Seth over for dinner to see if they noticed anything.

"Have you been burning incense?" Seth asked.

I didn't tell them about the dog. We talked instead about Seth's gallery opening. He said that it was coming along swimmingly. He was fairly trembling with excitement.

At the university, Jasper was still trying too hard to be my friend. I didn't understand why he was bothering. We could certainly work together without being friends and I didn't tell Alice what to do. It occurred to me that I would rather he sass me back. At least then my latent hostility would come off as jest and I wouldn't have to feel guilty about being an asshole. If my life were a rom-com, we would have had a heart-to-heart and I would have demanded an apology for how he'd once treated me and he would have expressed heartfelt sorrow and I would have forgiven him. As my life was not a rom-com and I had no intention of letting Jasper think that I gave a shit what he thought and, more importantly, had no intention of ever forgiving him, none of that happened. Naysayers will tell you that when you forgive someone it's really for yourself. Bullshit. My grudge cost me nothing. It was Jasper's fucking incessant attempts to make nice that were causing the current problem.

Jasper didn't ask me about Edward and I didn't bring him up either. I wondered if Jasper even knew that we'd gone to Forks.

Left to my own devices one morning at home, and feeling less than enthused about the prospect of going through the mountains of research that I'd collected on Victorian crime stats, I sat down at my computer and idly began conducting internet searches for unsolved murders in the state of Washington.

What I found made me sick.

Unable to take it anymore, I searched for the cabin instead, for its history. Jung had argued that places could be haunted, the gloomy atmosphere almost provoking the associated violence, a natural response to the environment rather than any work of the supernatural. But there weren't any records of real violence associated with the cabin.

I went back further, widening my scope to include the region as a whole. I knew, of course, that the Quileute had first come into contact with Europeans in the late 1700s, when the natives had enslaved Spanish, British and Russian seamen. It wasn't until after 1885 that the natives began moving onto the reservation, which was shortly thereafter burned down by a settler who wanted the land for himself.

I read again that story about the supposed pirate treasure. Spaniards had begun exploring the Pacific Coast in the late 1500s, looking for the Northwest Passage. Francis Drake himself was rumored to have gone as far north as British Columbia. But there was no reason for pirates to really operate this far north. The Spanish operations were much further south, so there was probably little credence to the story about the two pirate brothers who'd sail here to hide the treasure that they had taken from the Spanish. The remains of the monastery where the brothers had supposedly stopped over still stood on Rock Island a mile off of the coast. Legend said that the pirates had paid off the monks to pray for their souls.

The legend also said that the brothers had fallen in love with a Quileute woman, and had killed each other in fits of jealousy. Their treasure was supposed to be buried somewhere on Quileute lands, or at least what would have been Quileute lands at the time.

Others claimed that the treasure was buried somewhere in the ruins of the Rock Island monastery, which had been wiped out by a hurricane. The church still owned the island but had done nothing to rebuild. The place was barely half-a-mile in diameter and was the sort of harsh environment that could only attract two kinds of people: Masochists seeking a life of austerity and treasure hunters. Despite the name, the island was mostly marshland, and almost every year someone accidentally drowned while looking for the treasure. The authorities would track the body down by looking for the metal detector.

I Googled the island, and found an image taken from some distance at night, the island a dark mass in the glittering sea, the ruins of the monastery reduced to a stone archway and some damaged columns like broken skeletal fingers reaching up from the grave, standing crooked against the brilliant light of the moon.

Still trying to forget all about modern-day bludgeonings, rapes and stabbings, I threw myself into conspiracy theories about treasure maps and buried wealth.

Feeling braver after lunch, I looked again for crimes committed in the region of Port Angeles, but limited my search to the early twentieth century and years prior, the decades separating me from the violence in question serving as a palliative to horror.

The most interesting case that I found involved a pub owner who was found shot to death in his home. The police suspected his business partner, but they knew that the pub owner had been killed sometime after six o'clock in the morning, because either he or the killer had brought in the morning paper, and the business partner had an alibi from five o'clock that morning until well after one o'clock in the afternoon, which was when the body was discovered. Finally, someone—probably a bored policeman who was supposed to be doing something else entirely—realized that the newspaper in question wasn't quite right. There was an advertisement at the bottom of Page 2 which had been pulled at the last minute (no reason was given for pulling the advertisement and I assumed that only some inadvertent yet blatant vulgar sexual innuendo could excuse stopping the presses after they'd started running). The police went to the Port Angeles newspaper, found the fellow in charge of the printing, confirmed that one copy had indeed been run with the advertisement, but that no one knew what had happened to that copy. The police tracked down the boys in charge of delivering the papers to all of the houses. The boy assigned to the deceased's neighborhood swore on his grandmother's grave that he'd delivered the paper to the old curmudgeon, same as always. The police searched the deceased's property and couldn't find the second paper anywhere, so they went back to the boy and questioned him again. At last, the boy, in a fit of temper to which I could easily relate having once been under police scrutiny myself, said that he was sure he'd delivered the paper because the old geezer was always refusing to pay his bill, saying that the boy wasn't delivering the paper like he should, which was a bold faced lie, because the boy always delivered his papers, every one of them, and maybe the neighbor was stealing them, because she didn't take the paper, and that wasn't the boy's fault was it? So the police went to the neighbor, and sure enough, she _had_ taken the paper that morning, and so what? Were they going to arrest her for being a thief? They arrested the business partner instead. He had a nephew at the newspaper, a young man who was a little slow and couldn't possibly have understood why it might have been a mistake to hand over that misprint of the paper when his uncle brought him that late snack at work the night before the murder.

Aside from that case, murders as such weren't common in the Port Angeles region.

So if there wasn't something haunted about this stretch of land that attracted murder, then what was it?

Whoever had killed Tanya had to have known that the cabin would be empty. But how? I doubted that someone had been left with a shotgun to ward off anyone who might be passing by. So the cabin had been chosen by chance and if it hadn't been free, the killer would have gone somewhere else and, in any case, were lucky that no one had interrupted them in the midst of the murder.

So much for the place of the crime having some bearing on the case.

I went back to the means of the crime. So-called vampire fetishes aside, I didn't buy that there any sort of occult connection. And there were no signs of sexual activity. So either the murderer wasn't one of Tanya's lovers or else she'd died before matters could go that far. Perhaps it was just a game.

How could anyone be so callous?

I tried to remember myself at that age. Could I have been capable of doing something so carelessly vicious at the time? I'd been fickle, surely. I remembered occasionally thinking to myself that anything was worth it, if only I could avoid another day in that town. I'd hated my bullies, but could I have ever killed one of them? In a flash of anger, maybe, could I have struck one of them, and killed the person by accident?

Perhaps. I was honest enough to admit that. Even if they'd never laid a hand on me, I remembered the way my hands would ball into fists, wishing that I could punch them in the face as I listened to their jeering voices.

But that would have been the work of an instant. Whoever had killed Tanya had taken their time. It took several minutes for someone to bleed to death. Several long minutes during which no one called the police, no one tried to stop the bleeding, no one felt any regret. It wasn't an accident.

I had been sitting on Charlie's couch, huddled in a blanket and trying to forget everything that had happened with Renee and Phil in Florida, idly flipping through the channels looking for something to distract me, when I landed on a news report about Edward's arrest.

My fingers froze on the remote control. My breath stopped in my chest.

Panic. An instinctual animal response that I felt anytime that Edward Cullen or Tanya Denali would appear at the far end of the hallway in school or their laughter would waft across a parking lot.

A stupid response. They didn't matter to me anymore. I was going away to college and no one from Forks High was going with me, or at least not to the same school.

A numb feeling began settling into my limbs as I listened to the reporter describe the means of Tanya's murder.

I realized that I would never have to see Tanya again. I felt a kind of relief. I couldn't deny having felt some sort of relief, but it wasn't joy.

I swallowed hard, watching the footage of Edward being led to and from the Port Angeles police station in handcuffs, the panicky feeling in my chest spiraling out of control. I had difficulty even concentrating on the rest of the news report.

Afterwards, I tried to put it out of my mind, deciding that it had nothing to do with me. I briefly considered calling Alice to ask her about it, but I'd spoken to Alice only once or twice over the summer—I'd always hated talking over the phone—and she hadn't mentioned anything about the murder. I'd told her about coming home early, explaining that Renee and Phil were busy with work and that I'd hated the weather. She'd told me about her cousins in Mississippi. We had never enjoyed gossiping about our classmates, preferring to pretend instead that they just didn't exist. So why should I break that rule now, just because one of them was dead and another one had been charged with her murder? I was above such petty concerns, wasn't I?

The next day, the story was repeated in a more abbreviated format. I was able to pay a little more attention this time.

At first, I didn't even notice it. Such a small detail, anyhow. Or at least it was to me, a casual bystander.

The date and time of the murder.

I was sure that they'd gotten it wrong. That was all. It was confusing, to be sure, but not unbelievable.

So, that night, just to be sure, I asked Charlie about it.

"Why do you want to know about that?" he asked.

We were sitting at the table eating dinner. I'd made stroganoff, his favorite, with pre-cooked beef for his portion, since asking a vegetarian to cook something that she won't taste is like asking for food poisoning.

My father and I had what I later came to realize was a strange relationship. We weren't what other families would consider close. We rarely spoke and never embraced. Even at the age of twenty-eight, ten years later, I had never told him that I loved him or heard him offer the sentiment himself.

But actions always spoke louder than words to me. Charlie took care of me. And he never hurt me. That was more than enough.

Besides, we'd improved a great deal since my arrival to Forks at the age of fourteen. Charlie had seemed uncertain of me at first, being wary of this teenaged creature suddenly inhabiting his space, and so he'd adopted a watch and wait strategy. That was fine with me since I wasn't entirely comfortable around him either. I'd never lived full-time with a man and the ones with whom I'd lived on a temporary basis hadn't exactly left a positive impression. I was sixteen before I stopped leaving a chair propped up against my door at night. _At least you _have_ a bedroom_, I'd chastised myself when I finally broke myself of the habit.

Charlie hadn't seemed surprised when I cut short my last visit to Renee. And he hadn't asked any questions. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps he should have been asking questions all along. About my life with Renee. About what was going on in school.

Yet what good did it do to blame your parents for your troubles? By his own example, Charlie had taught me a valuable lesson in stoicism. _Ignore other people and just keep going_. If other people weren't going to be there for me, why should I care what they thought?

That night, though, sitting at the dining room table, I was still more of a basket-case than a stoic. I was hardly sure of myself or about my interest in Edward Cullen's case. I just wanted to be sure.

So when Charlie asked me why I was interested, I shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know. It's just the news reporter got something wrong."

"What do you mean he got something wrong?"

"It was a _she_. She said that Tanya was killed at 5 o'clock the night before I left for Florida. But that can't be right, because I saw Edward in the woods in La Push around that time. He couldn't have made it all the way to Port Angeles and back again."

Charlie's fork fell to the plate with a clatter.

Did I ever consider the possibility of letting Edward go to jail? Once Charlie knew what I'd seen, keeping my mouth shut wasn't an option. But if Charlie had been in the dark, would I have gone to the police of my own accord?

For a split second, maybe, I would have considered saying nothing. But I would have gone eventually.

I wanted to believe that.

I would have given Edward his alibi if only because it was the truth. It didn't matter how he'd treated me in the past. I was better than him.

The interrogations at the Port Angeles police station were humiliating. Charlie was friends with everyone on the force in Port Angeles, so they kept apologizing to him as they led me away for questioning, but that didn't stop them from asking me how many times I'd enjoyed sexual relations with Edward—_Maybe it wasn't sex, _they reasoned,_ but you let him feel you up didn't you?_—or suggesting that I was so desperate for Edward's affections that I was willing to perjure myself on his behalf. They made me go over my timeline again and again. _Motherfuckers_. The memory of that still made me boil. Who the fuck were they to imply that I'd made a mistake? I was smart goddamnit. My intelligence was, in fact, the one thing that I had going for me. I didn't make mistakes. I'd seen Edward Cullen in the meadow twice that day, before and after Tanya was murdered. There was no way that he could have made it to Port Angeles and back in that time.

I had to return for questioning at least four times. They didn't even do me the courtesy of telling me in person that they'd finally accepted my statement. I had to hear on the news that they were dropping the charges against Edward.

I saw Edward again, of course, that day in the diner when Renee saw fit to swoop into town on her broomstick, but Charlie never mentioned the case to me. Alice asked me about it only once, and I'd explained. She had pursed her lips and nodded, not asking any questions. She had her own problems at the time and anyhow, that was our gift to each other. We didn't push.

Reflecting back on the case now, I couldn't help but be overwhelmed by the list of possible suspects. Much as I loathed psychological profiling, I wondered if it might help whittle down the list. _What kind of a person is capable of murder?_ I was sure that there were a few people so devoted to pacifism that they could never commit murder, but otherwise anyone might be a murderer. There were just so many possible motives. Self-defense. Defense of someone else. Vengeance. Anger.

The creatures that made Forks High such a nightmare for me certainly seemed capable of violence. After all, someone had stabbed Eric that night at First Beach, and if the photos from that party were somehow faked, then the so-called "brat pack" would no longer have their alibis. But could they really have killed Tanya? Could they have turned on one of their own? I pictured them, like mice in an overcrowded cage, cannibalizing one another. I was too prejudiced to be objective.

I returned to the notion that the murder had been an accident. I could see the "brat pack" playing a game, like all of the games that they'd played with me, and not realizing that she was losing too much blood, not knowing what to do when they realized that she was dead. And being too afraid—too _cowardly_—to call 911.

Not every killer acted out of passion or caprice though. Perhaps Tanya's murder was the work of some Leopold and Loeb. The crime of an apathetic sociopath merely testing a hypothesis: The possibility of a perfect crime.

If so, it wasn't Mike or anyone else from the "brat pack."

But how could you ever claim to really know another person? Who was I to say that Mike Newton didn't have the psychology or the intellect to plan and carry out a perfect murder?

For all I knew, Esme Cullen herself could be the murderer. She had red hair, after all. Carlisle could have covered for her, claiming that she was with him at the time of the murder.

Perhaps Carlisle had been having an affair with Tanya and Esme cracked. Was a woman capable of subduing Tanya and killing her?

That was insane, of course. Edward's mother couldn't be a killer. His father couldn't have slept with Tanya.

I'd much rather suspect Aro Denali. One daughter had been sleeping around until she was murdered, another became a stripper, and a third was in a mental institution. Far be it from me to judge anyone, but did all of that suggest dysfunction? Why hadn't Edward noticed that something was off about them? Had he just been too horny to notice the signs? If so, he was far more selfish than even I'd suspected.

Whoever the killer was, they knew Edward. Of that, I was certain. It was simply too much of a coincidence that a car that looked just like his, and being driven by someone who looked just like him, was seen picking up Tanya.

Had Aro Denali tried to set Edward up for his own daughter's murder? Had he discovered Tanya's proclivity for dallying with other men? Had he decided that Edward was to blame?

Was Aro running a prostitution ring starring his own daughter? Had Tanya decided that she wanted out? Had Aro blamed Edward for his daughter's desire to turn over a new leaf?

I remembered everything that my mother had taught me about pedophiles. I remembered Phil.

My mother had grown up in Forks. She probably went to school with Aro.

And that was as far as I got in my thinking when I decided that it was all too much.

I didn't want to rehash the past. I still felt slightly nauseous whenever I thought back to the news stories I'd come across when I'd first started my research that morning. I was a hypocrite, studying violence through the course of my work but only when denuded of any gruesome details. I didn't want to know exactly how many blows it had taken to beat a woman's skull in or how her son had cried out in plaintive wails as he watched his mother die.

I began to wonder if I should tell Edward that I wasn't going to help him anymore.

Of course, because there was to be no rest for the weary, Edward called me that night to say that his private detective had been "debriefed" and was following up on what we'd found. It might be a while before we heard anything back. In the meantime, Edward wanted to know when I was free to come over. He wanted to make a list of all the men in Forks and Port Angeles who might have been sleeping with Tanya. I thought that limiting it to Forks and Port Angeles was being generous, but as it was, the list was already going to be too long. Did he really think that we were going to question all of them?

I told Edward that I was busy with midterms and that I would get back to him.

My students were still complaining that the readings were too lengthy and convoluted. _Why didn't Dr. Seuss write history books?_ I was sad to see that Bree Tanner, one of the students who'd come to my office hours earlier in the semester, appeared to have lost interest in the course. She hadn't withdrawn, but I hadn't seen her in lecture for a while. It was always disappointing to see a promising student give up. I'd begun to look forward to her comments in class, and while her essays weren't written with any real elegance, they were at least interesting.

Edward called me again a few days later, wisely not bothering to wait for me to follow up on my promise. Thanks to Jessica, he'd managed to get in touch with Lauren-of-the-big-hair. He tried to make me feel sorry for him—having to endure conversation with the twin airheads—until I reminded him that _he_ was the one who was their friend in high school, a charge which he tried to deny; we agreed to disagree. He admitted telling Lauren that he might just be swinging by Dallas in the near future, whoring himself out for the greater good, and in return got her to give him a few more names from Tanya's dance card: Mr. Banner (our biology teacher? _ugh_), a mailman, a bus boy at _The Lodge_ and one of my father's own deputies.

In addition to the names that Kate had already given us—Mike Newton's father, the guy who ran the grocery store, and the gas station attendant—that gave us a total of seven. Edward's PI was still working on the name of the gas station attendant (it occurred to me that this PI was probably putting his kid through college on Edward's dime). Edward wanted to talk to the other members of the Rotary Club to confirm that they'd really dined at _The Lodge_ the night of Tanya's murder, as this dinner gave two of the suspects an alibi. But he had already questioned the employees of _The Lodge_ about the payphone behind the restaurant being used to report Tanya's death, so that was another bridge burned and I was going to have to do the questioning about the Rotary Club meeting there that night.

Edward also wanted me to question Mr. Banner.

"Why don't we just give these named to my dad and let the police do the questioning?" I asked.

"So they can drop the ball again? Besides, I think you'll have more luck," Edward said.

"And I'm supposed to say what, 'Hey Mr. Banner, this is really creepy, but I heard you were fucking one of your students and oh, by the way, do you have an alibi for the night she died?'"

"I already know that he had an alibi. There was some faculty softball game that night. His picture was in the paper. You can't possibly imagine how long my list of suspects was in the beginning. I already crossed him off."

I was going to remind him that he'd left all of his friends off that supposedly exhaustive list of suspects, but he didn't give me a chance.

"Besides, do you really think that I would let you anywhere near him if I thought that there was a chance that he did it? I just want him to give up the names of anyone else she might have been involved with. And if he won't tell us, we'll threaten him with the cops."

"Why don't you just question him by yourself? I trust you. I'm sure you'll do swell."

"Banner hated me. His class was a fucking joke. Don't you remember it?"

I remembered it. I remembered that lab table and all of those lab projects that I shared with Edward. A daily dose of hell.

Edward didn't bother waiting for my confirmation. "He thinks that I was a prick. I was. But he deserved it. Anyhow, you're the police chief's daughter. Everyone liked you. They all think that I'm the guy who got away with murder."

"No one liked me. And I don't like talking to people."

"The only reason you weren't valedictorian is because they stopped doing class rankings. And I don't buy this antisocial bullshit either. You talk to people all of the time. You're talking to me right now. You're a teacher."

"That's different." It _was_ bullshit about the class ranking thing though.

"How?"

"You won't leave me alone. I have no choice but to talk to you. Irene and that waitress were bad enough. I don't think that I can question anyone else. I study history because dead people can't talk back." I felt ill just thinking about walking back into that biology classroom. "I have social anxiety disorder."

Edward wasn't convinced. "I find that hard to believe. You don't take any of my shit."

"If I could, I would live in a lighthouse and never see anyone."

"Why would you want to do that?" He seemed truly perplexed. No one ever got this. Everything was always so easy for them.

"It's just so exhausting. Dealing with people."

"I never would have thought that. I mean, yeah, sometimes you seem stressed out. But I thought that was because you don't like me. You don't seem afraid of anything. You got a fucking lap dance."

"I _don't_ like you. I don't like _anyone_. But it doesn't matter. I'm just following the rules."

"The rules?" Edward asked.

"Of social etiquette."

"So you pretend to like people just because you don't want to seem rude?"

I thought he was being intentionally naïve. "Please, like you aren't pretending with me right now."

"I'm not pretending."

"Whatever." This conversation had taken a turn for the strange. _Because talking about your old biology teacher's sexual proclivities isn't weird._

"Why bother pretending? I don't see why you aren't just honest with everyone."

"And not talk to anyone? I did that once. It didn't go well."

"You mean high school?"

"Ha! No. No one wanted to talk to me in high school. There's a difference between people not talking to you and you not talking to them." I should have ended this conversation already.

"When then?" Edward pressed.

I wished we could just drop it. Surely, the rules of etiquette no longer applied. His questions were invasive. "My first couple of years of undergrad." I would just leave it at that. "I wasn't very social." There. That explained it. No need to mention the _Mountains of Madness._

"Why not? What about Alice?"

I shook my head, but what did it matter anyhow? I might as well tell him the truth. It wasn't as if we were friends. In a few months, we'd go back to be being perfect strangers. So what if he told Jasper? I imagined Jasper running around the department calling me a lunatic. Everyone already knew as much. "Alice was in New York. She didn't come back until sophomore year. Before that, I didn't want to talk to anyone. If they left me alone, that was more than enough for me."

"But you're obviously more social now. You've got friends."

"I've got _acquaintances_," I corrected.

"Alice isn't a friend? What about the other people you mention? And the ones at that happy hour?"

"I don't know. How do you define a _friend_? They're just people I know."

"Even Alice?"

"Alice is Alice," I said, remembering what she was like when I moved to Forks. She might not have been popular, but she wasn't _un_popular either. At least, not until she met me.

She had to put up with a lot of shit because of me. So I put up with a lot of shit because of her. I owed her.

"What does that mean?" Edward asked.

I shrugged, even though he couldn't see it. How could I possibly explain it?

Edward started again, "About high school, all that stuff, I never said—"

"I don't want to talk about it," I cut him off.

"Why not?"

"It's done and over with. It doesn't matter." If he tried to apologize, I would reach through the phone and murder him. Self-defense. He was not allowed to apologize.

"That's clearly not true. I mean, I know that I was an asshole."

"Why the fuck should I care about that now?"

"You deserve an apology."

"What good would that do me?"

"I don't know. Closure?"

"_Closure?_" I asked.

"You know, old wounds."

"_Old wounds?_"

"I'm clearly pissing you off and I don't mean to."

"I'm just trying to understand why the fuck you think I give a shit about anything you have to say to me. Do you think that I've been sitting around all this time waiting for you to come back into my life?"

"No, I—"

"Do I _look_ like Alice? I don't give a shit what you think of me."

"That's obvious."

"Do you think that there's something _wrong_ with me that you think you can fix?"

"No."

"Then what the fuck?"

"It's what's wrong with _me_. It's what _I _owe."

I didn't respond.

"I'm a narcissist, remember?" Edward snorted softly, clearly trying to dispel the tension. "Do you really think that's true? That nothing that happened to either of us in high school matters?"

"Of course it's true. It was ten years ago. If we haven't gotten over it by now, then there would definitely be something wrong with us." Realizing that I'd just implied that there was something wrong with Edward for still dwelling on a decade-old murder, I deflected by pretending that I was only talking about myself, which was in fact the truth insofar as I really only cared about myself. Edward's obsessions were his problem. "Honestly, I hardly remember any of it." I remembered hiding in the bathroom and scurrying through the halls and avoiding the cafeteria at all cost. Otherwise, it was just a gray-black miasma. Nothing. I couldn't even recall the things they'd said. For the most part. "Besides, we probably deserved it."

There was a beat of silence. "I don't—you're not serious. What do you mean?"

"There's a pecking order. There always is. That's just the natural way of things. You were an asshole. Someone had to be." And it was all too easy to suspect an asshole of murder, though to be honest I supposed that Edward only seemed like an asshole to me and a few select other individuals. Everyone else thought that he was a golden boy. "And I wasn't a hundred percent either. I could have done something different, and I didn't." What good did it do to blame other people for your problems? You can't control other people. You can only control yourself.

It occurred to me that, by the same logic, Edward could have _chosen_ not to be an asshole. But hypotheticals were pointless.

"Done something?" Edward asked, his tone disbelieving. "What do you mean?"

"Whatever—whatever it would have taken." I could have done something different. I was sure of it. Dressed differently, walked differently, spoken differently. Different skin, different everything. Anything to make them leave me alone. If I'd tried, to change I wondered if they would have let me get away with it. Or would they have just gone on treating me the same way? "Which is stupid of course. The past is the past. And I couldn't have changed. Not then. It was just too hard. How could I pretend to be someone else when I felt like I was being pulled in a thousand different directions?" Then, realizing how that sounded, I tried to explain in a way that didn't make me sound crazy. "I was just young, you know. They say that you don't know yourself at that age. I always felt like—" I didn't want to say it.

"Like what?"

_Like I was coming apart at the seams._ I couldn't say that.

I considered changing the subject, but I was the one responsible for bringing it up, and changing the subject would be like admitting that it still mattered. "There was stuff with my mother. It doesn't matter now. But there was. I don't blame her for how I was in Forks. Other people have shitty parents and they don't react the way I did. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn't do it the same way. _Fake it 'till you make it_ and all that."

"We could have been friends?"

I choked. "Are you kidding me?" The incongruity of his suggested alliance was nothing short of comical. And grotesque.

Never in a million years could I have ever been friends with a monster like him. Joined in on his games and done to others what he'd done to me? No. I wanted to believe that I couldn't.

But would I have known any better, if I hadn't been on the receiving end myself?

"I'm sor—" Edward started again.

"I don't want to talk about it," I interrupted.

"I was a dick."

"What's the point of bringing that up now?"

"So that we can move past it."

"To what end?"

There was a long pause. "So that we can be friends," Edward said at last hesitantly and, if I was being honest, lamely.

I blinked.

I held the phone away from my ear and looked down at it.

I blinked again.

I put the phone back up to my ear and answered. "We can't be friends."

"Why not?"

_The dissimilarity of our forms and natures is too profound a gap to ever be bridged. _"We don't have anything in common," I pointed out, desperate to change the subject. We couldn't be anything to each other. We were strangers. Practically strangers.

But if he insisted on knowing why that had to be the case, I would have to tell him—and I couldn't do that—because he _would_ apologize—and I couldn't let him do that—because I would have to forgive him. That's what the rules said—you had to forgive people who asked for forgiveness. Then you were bound. Like friends. And I couldn't do that.

"That's not true," he argued. "We have high school."

Was he out of his fucking mind? "We had a completely different experience of high school."

"We both live in Seattle now."

"We live in completely different neighborhoods."

"We're both successful professionals."

"Medicine is boring and you don't know anything about history."

"I'm still reading your book. We can hang out together."

"Just what would 'hanging out' constitute? I doubt that we enjoy doing the same things."

"What do you enjoy doing?"

"Reading. Not talking to people. Watching horror movies."

"I am critically behind on my horror movie viewing. You could get me up to speed."

I considered my options. We simply couldn't continue down this path. I could either tell him to go fuck himself and hang up—which meant acknowledging that he had the power to distress me still—or lie.

_Subterfuge!_ It was not my forte but Edward need only believe me long enough for me to escape this conversation.

"I suppose so," I said slowly, deciding—because it was reassuring to do so—that he was being genuine. Feigning acceptance was easier than resistance anyhow. Over the years, I had found that people frequently lied about their intentions to engage in social interaction. It was practically one of the rules of etiquette that you do so. And it was uncouth to draw attention to the deceit, as it went a long way towards preserving the social fabric.

"What do you do when you're hanging out with your other friends?"

"Whatever they feel like doing," I answered stupidly, confused by his question. Why was he pursuing this line of conversation? He was supposed to say that he looked forward to 'hanging out' with me and I was supposed to say "sure" and then we were supposed to hang up. And ideally never speak again, the quest to find Tanya's killer be damned.

"You seem pretty opinionated to be so flexible."

"I only care about things that matter." And caring about others too frequently invited disappointment. Passive disinterest was a much better approach. Thus, I was hardly one to veto a plan and was never the one to suggest an outing, unless it happened to coincide with one of the few events that I made a special effort to observe, like a birthday or an anniversary, convenient as these occasions were to the maintenance of the social niceties. Anything that I really cared about I did alone. Like going to antiquarian book shows.

"What do you like to do on a date?" he asked.

_What do I what?!_

**AN: REVIEWERS RECEIVE AN OUTTAKE FROM EDWARD (FROM THE DAY THAT THE CHARGES WERE DROPPED UNTIL JASPER'S ASSUMPTION OF A TEACHING POSITION AT BELLA'S UNIVERSITY).**

**Thank you to everyone who has suggested a theory on the killer! Your minds are so deliciously devious!**

**The Washington pirates and Rock Island are my own invention. Gothic though pirates and ruined churchy edifices may be, I have no idea if Washington has a history of pirates or monasteries. I freely admit that I have committed a crime of laziness that enrages me when committed by certain other authors (no names, no names…). Flame me if you must but at least I'm not asking to be paid for this tripe. **

**Rec: It Must Have Been the Mistletoe by KristenLynn **Edward has avoided Bella—and her annoying crush—for three years. This year, an encounter under the mistletoe at the Chief's Christmas Eve party changes everything, in ways neither of them expected. Under the Mistletoe contest continuation, NOW COMPLETE Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance - Chapters: 7 - Words: 32,234 - Reviews: 366 - Favs: 460 - Follows: 205 - Updated: Jan 26, 2011 - Published: Dec 24, 2010 - Edward, Bella – Complete

**Is there any good Kwanza/Hanukah fanfiction? I love the scene in **_**This is not my life**_** where Renee comes to Thanksgiving decked out in native clothes and cornstalks. **


	16. Chapter 16

**Thank you to everyone who is reading. My apologies if I have not yet replied to your review. I will do so asap. If you reviewed as a Guest, please sign in so that I have a reply link to which to send your outtake.**

**Meyer owns all.**

Chapter 13

'_Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard,_

_And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,_

_Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard_

_To see skull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stone'_

_Keats_

BPOV

_Last time in _Gothic, _one Edward Cullen inquired into the dating habits of our heroine. She was, to say the least, shocked at his effrontery._

I shook my head, happy that this conversation was being conducted via telephone and not face-to-face. Was Edward Cullen really asking me about my dating habits? "I don't date," I said.

"Ever?" Edward was starting to go above and beyond the normal level of inquisitiveness.

"I don't like people," I reminded him. _And people don't like me._ Assholes.

"But if you ever met _someone_—" Edward trailed off. The way that he stressed the gender neutral nature of the word _someone_ hadn't escaped my notice. Now _he_ was the asshole.

"Someone psychotic enough to be interested in a person like me?" There may have been a slight tinge of hostility in my voice.

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to." I remembered _that_ much from high school at least. _Lesbo, lesbo_, they'd chanted. Lest I have any doubt that no one of the opposite sex could ever find me attractive.

"I'm not trying to start a fight."

"Then what the hell are you doing?" _I mean, what the fuck?_ He said that he wanted to be friends—_and how junior high was a request like that anyhow?_—and then he started with this bullshit?

"I just wondered if you were seeing anyone," Edward hedged.

"No, I haven't found a guy delusional enough to want me." _That's right, a _guy_, asshole. So go ahead and point out that I'm wasting my time with the human species and should just put in a request now for my blow-up doll husband._ "But if you know of anyone with vision problems or a penchant for freaks, let me know."

"That's not what the fuck I meant," Edward snapped.

"Whatever," I huffed. If nothing else, my recently renewed use of the term _Whatever_ had more than convinced me of Generation X's role as indispensable, if not meaningful, contributors to society.

"If you weren't so sensitive—"

"_I_'m sensitive?" Okay, I was. I was also just calling it the way that it was.

"I only want to know more about you."

"There's nothing to know. I'm boring."

"I know that's not the case. And you can ask me, you know."

"Ask you what?" _How many kittens he drowned on the way to work each morning?_

"Questions about me. What I like doing. If I'm seeing anyone."

Why on earth would I want to know about that? "I don't ask questions. I don't do that."

"You don't ask your friends about their lives?"

"I only ask questions that I already know the answers to. If they want to volunteer something, it's up to them. I don't go around invading their privacy."

"I didn't realize that I was invading your privacy. If it makes you feel better, I'm not seeing anyone either."

"I—" I sputtered. "That's none of my business."

"Friends know things like that about each other."

"I don't have friends," I reminded him quickly.

"_Acquaintances _know things like that."

"Hmph." I was not impressed.

"Are we?" he asked.

"Are we what?"

"Acquaintances?"

I panicked, which was quite impressive considering that I was already in panic overdrive. "You're a _person I know_. You have to work your way up to _acquaintance_."

"Oh, I will," Edward gloated. "I'm an overachiever."

I didn't want him to get ahead of himself. "I don't grade on a curve. And you have a lot to make up for." But since I wasn't even letting him talk about the things that he had to make up for, just bringing it up had been a mistake, so I didn't see how he was ever going to succeed, and I wasn't going to let him. I wasn't.

"I'm looking forward to it."

I didn't know how to respond to that. So I hastily bid him a goodnight and hung up.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

A few days later, Embry and Quil called to tell me that they had completed their casual questioning of the La Push residents. They didn't think much of my theory about Tanya finding the pirate gold and the murderer killing her to keep the location a secret.

"Wouldn't that make _us_ the most likely suspects?" Embry asked.

Oh.

My hastily offered apology was accepted, and all was well.

In the meantime, I had begun to notice a pattern. Edward would call every other night, sometimes two nights in a row, ostensibly to discuss the progress of the investigation, though as no progress was being made, our discussions about the case generally revolved around, on the one hand, his complaints that the police had overlooked important clues (namely the obvious guilt of Eric, Demetri and Felix—Edward apparently taking Sherman's approach to the subject: _Throw them all in jail and let God sort it out_) and, on the other hand, the 'crackpot theories' (in Edward's words) that I offered up, as I had chosen to say nothing of my suspicions involving pedophilia rings and the like, selfishly preferring the absurd to more realistic options too gross to contemplate.

I speculated, for instance, that Tanya was a drug mule in league with the mailman, and had been taken down by a Columbian cartel as a warning to the Russians. Edward pointed out that marijuana was the worst that she'd ever done and I reminded him that dealers never do their own merchandise. Then I remembered James and realized that drugs were probably a sore issue for Edward and I should just drop it. Drug mules have to travel, Edward informed me, and Tanya didn't do much of that. I let it go at that even though it occurred to me that all of her "sleeping around" could very well have been a cover for dealing.

Maybe, I said, she had been mistaken for someone else by the murderer. Maybe she just looked like the intended victim. _Who? _Edward asked. I thought for a moment, then suggested a long lost twin, an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune in the East. Edward's silence told me what he thought of that.

Oh, this one was even better, I said, maybe Tanya had been on the run from the mob. Her mother was supposed to be dead right? Maybe her mother was actually in jail and the Denalis were in the witness protection program. Her mother was a mob princess (is that what they called them?) and Tanya had been the key witness in putting her away at the tender age of ten. Her innocent father and sisters hadn't known a thing until the FBI had broken down their door. Then the FBI had sent them all to Forks after the trial, which explained a lot about that family if you thought about it—how functional could a family be when the matriarch was hiring a hit against her own daughter?

I asked Edward if he was going to add my theories to his murder notebooks. I couldn't help but sense the note of sarcasm in his voice as he agreed to do so.

Nor did it escape my notice that these phone calls of Edward's slowly began to devolve into discussions about topics totally unrelated to Tanya's murder. Topics like: How his day was, how my day was, what new musical obscenities had I been subjecting my eardrums to, why had he allowed his mother to decorate his apartment, and so on. The sort of conversations that one might have with an acquaintance or possibly a friend. I was extremely suspicious of his motives in trying to convince me that medicine wasn't as boring as I'd thought, but even I had to admit that some of his stories were amusing. Edward said that he was still reading my book even though I told him not to bother, and he asked me for recommendations from the realm of gothic literature. This last question created a conundrum, because of course one's personal favorites are never entirely appropriate are they? So of course I wanted to say Poe, but everyone says Poe, though they always do overlook that tale about the teeth even though that is perhaps the most perfectly perfect horror story ever written, with its high-pitched concentration on the tiniest detail. And then I wanted to say Gilchrist, but Gilchrist could be a bit tawdry if one wasn't a sentimental teenage girl. And then I wanted to say Lovecraft, but he wasn't gothic at all, even if he was the god-of-horror, and despite the impressiveness of his all-consuming narratives and mythological schemas, some pretty fucked-up racist sentiments were too intimately intertwined in the Lovecraftian universe for me to just toss off a recommendation without second-thoughts. So instead of answering, I asked Edward if he knew that Hollywood used to go out of their way to portray vampires as Jews and that Count Chocula had once worn a Star of David, and that Dennis Wheatley's devil worshippers were all communists and lesbians and ugly to boot—which didn't make sense since you would think that the devil could help a brother or a sister out—and then digressed on whether or not it really was possible to have horror without an Other, and if not, how to construct an Other that would not offend one's sensibilities regarding race, gender and religion in today's day and age. It was then that I realized that I had been going on for a good ten minutes without interruption and felt compelled to apologize. Edward said that he didn't mind, but I was sure that he was lying. His deception on this point was, no doubt, more of that rehabilitation program of his, the one _To Become the Sort of Man Who Would Not Be Suspected for Murder_, the same project that involved becoming an ER doctor and befriending socially withdrawn introverts. I did not believe that he was telling the truth when he said that he enjoyed listening to me speak so passionately on a subject in which I was so greatly interested.

I wasn't fond of speaking on the telephone, but every time there was a pause in the conversation and I thought of asking Edward what the hell it was that he really wanted from me, he would bid me farewell and hang up.

I noted that it took longer and longer for these pauses to occur each time he called.

I decided to put it all down as conversational practice and let it go at that. I was sure that Edward would forget about me as soon as this thing with Tanya had blown over and he no longer had to prove to anyone that he was a good person.

Our return trip to Forks was ostensibly scheduled for Homecoming, the second weekend of November. It was our class' ten year reunion, so the occasion was sure to draw together many 'persons of interest' in Tanya's death. Alice, too, was all a-flurry with plans of our triumphant return. I was not enamored of this plan. I had no intentions of returning for anything other than the investigation at hand. I envisioned spray-painting a spider-web diagram across the football field, then calling all of the men who had slept with Tanya down from the bleachers to take up their positions, giving them placards to wear 'round their necks listing the frequency of their liaisons, and using their distance from the center of the web to represent the usual locations of the sex acts in and around Forks. Edward would not admit it, but I think he was hoping for a denouement in the gymnasium, with the guilty party confessing his crimes under the pressure of Edward's heated cross-examination.

As the end of October crept ever closer, my anxiety over 'Homecoming' began to climb. I took to picturing an ordeal involving an ugly dress from a prom that I'd never attended and buckets of pigs' blood. I felt myself secretly becoming more and more annoyed with Edward, since I wouldn't be returning at all if it weren't for his insistence that this would be the perfect opportunity to gather evidence.

My resentment began to morph into outright anger as I tallied the many recent phone calls in which Edward's probing questions of my personal life had resulted in the revelation of more information than I was wont to share with anyone, let alone someone towards whom I was indifferent at best, and openly hostile at worst. Edward had gotten me to talk about horror movies and my favorite books. I'd waxed lyrical for fifteen minutes straight about a private collection I'd inspected once.

One night after a particularly prolonged conversation in which I'd divulged the intimate details of my passion for incunabula, I finally decided to put an end to it. Or, at least an end to the phone calls. I simply wouldn't pick up when he called. He'd figure it out eventually.

And that would have been that, had I not ended up on a bed the very next day with my shirt off and Edward's fingers running over my skin.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" I heard an unwelcome voice ask as the curtain in front of my examining table was pushed aside.

I scowled up at Edward. "I demand a different doctor. You can't treat me. Conflict of interest." It had occurred to me that Edward might be working the ER, but Angela had insisted on taking me to the closest hospital. Unfortunately, she'd had to leave me in the waiting room to go teach her next class. Abandoning me to my fate.

_Witch._

"I'm sorry ma'am, we're all backed up. I'm afraid that you'll have to wait at least an hour if you want to see another doctor."

I suspected that he was lying. "Another hour? How do you know that I don't have a punctured lung?"

"I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't be sitting here like this if you had a punctured lung."

"Whatever." I sniffed haughtily, refusing to believe that this was really happening.

"So," he asked, trying to nudge my blouse out of the way to inspect the area where my hand had been resting, "how did this happen?" Did I give him permission to touch me? No, I did not.

"I fell." Couldn't I just describe my symptoms and get an x-ray? Surely he didn't need to actually inspect the area of the injury.

"Hmm. You know, I'm going to need you to take off your bra."

_Motherfucker._ By this point, a nurse had appeared, the depths of my mortification requiring a witness apparently, and she offered to help me remove the offending item of clothing. Unwilling to deal with the real problem—the prospect of having to sit half naked in front of one of the people responsible for ensuring that I'd adopted a policy against appearing half naked in front of anyone—I decided to focus for a few seconds on the minor issue regarding said item of clothing. Stupid yellow polka dot bra.

Stupid _tiny_ yellow polka dot bra. And of course the nurse looked like a C-cup at least. Fuck my life.

But the distraction posed by my ridiculous choice in undergarments could only divert me for so long. Still refusing to comply with their requests to bare myself, I glared at the two of them—Barbie Nurse and Dickhead Doctor—as Edward read my chart and Barbie Nurse fiddled with my blood pressure cuff, because really, _really,_ this could not be fucking real. It was so horrible that I would have been laughing had it not been actually happening to me. It was, in fact, virtually a fulfillment of that nightmare wherein I had imagined myself pinned to the biology lab table from high school while Edward examined me, his jeering cohort urging him on.

'…_deprecating their _worst,_ but defying, almost desiring it, in the terrible and indefinite curiosity of despair….'_

I dared him—that's right—_dared him_, to say one goddamned thing inappropriate. It would vindicate every single suspicion I'd been having about his new good boy routine.

I felt a thrill of self-righteous fury.

Then, I calmed down.

Logic demanded one of two options: Either I let him examine my ribs or I reveal the truth about just how much I continued to distrust him, and thereby reveal the degree of power that he still held over me.

The choice was obvious. In all, it took me about five seconds to reason all this out, to realize that complete humiliation was inevitable, to accept it, to steel myself against it, and to disengage all emotion. If need be, I could just throw myself from the rafters of the theater and hope that this time I landed on my head.

Barbie Nurse helped me cover my breasts awkwardly so that Edward could look at my ribs.

"How did you fall?" Edward asked as I winced, his fingers gliding over a sensitive area, the sensation of skin on skin contact at least painful enough to dispel all confusion. It only made sense that this would hurt. If it did so chiefly because my ribs were injured was neither here nor there. It was the pain that mattered.

"I was the ghost in the rafters and the support line slipped." I imagined him making some snide remark about my weight causing the rope to slip, and then punching him in the throat and hopefully crushing his windpipe. I was _not _overweight and had, in point of fact, probably never been so, despite the numerous fucking comments certain people had once made on the subject. _Fucking anorexic cheerleaders. _

"Do you often haunt rafters?"

"Only when required by the joint faculty skits." I willed myself not to pull away as Edward traced the line of one of my ribs. "This year we're doing abbreviated skits from the Grand Guignol.

"I have no idea what that is."

_Plebian. _"André de Lorde wrote one of his plays about your people."

"My people?"

"Physicians. A doctor who turns his wife's lover into a zombie."

"Sounds fair."

"The zombie buries a chisel in the physician's skull."

"That sounds like less fun. Breathe," he told me, stethoscope on my chest.

I breathed.

"Deeply."

I breathed deeply.

"Are you sucking in your stomach?"

My hands curled into fists, preparing to punch him in the motherfucking throat. "No." I was though, sucking my stomach in, that is. Not much, but enough. My tummy was more "flattish" than concave even on my best days. And it really hurt today.

"I've got a bit of a gut now, too, you know."

I remembered the sight of him that morning in the bed and breakfast, not recalling a gut.

He guessed what I was thinking. "I was sucking in my stomach."

"I'm not sucking in my stomach," I lied. It really did hurt.

He rolled his eyes but didn't push it any further. "You need x-rays."

I had expected as much, so I said nothing as the nurse helped me into a gown. As if I couldn't do that on my own (I could, but it hurt). "Are you an actress?" she asked. What a fucking idiot.

"Only when Miss Post insists," I answered. Dear Miss Emily Post and her fucking rules of etiquette. The only thing standing between us and the barbarians at the gate.

"Don't listen to her," Edward apologized to Barbie Nurse for me. "They don't normally let her talk to strangers." If only he knew what was really going through my head.

Barbie Nurse's eyes were darting between Edward and me as if trying to unravel a mystery. If she succeeded, I hoped she'd clue me in. She probably wasn't an idiot. I just resented her for being pretty.

Edward and Barbie Nurse left me waiting for someone to take me up to radiology. I understood why the hospital didn't want patients wandering around on their own, but it was inefficient. As was the insistence that I see a doctor as opposed to a physician's assistant. I highly doubted that it took a medical degree to feel me up and to read x-rays.

By the time that I made it back from radiology—pictures of skeletons should be more fun—Edward was already waiting for me, sans Barbie Nurse this time. Studying the x-rays on a light board, Edward smiled, pretending to have a pleasant bedside manner. "Good news. They're only bruised."

I'd suffered abject humiliation, and they were only bruised? Bullshit.

"You should ice them and take pain reliever as needed," Edward said, turning to me.

"You're not going to wrap them?" What kind of shoddy outfit were they running around here? I knew that I should have gone to another hospital.

"We don't wrap bruised ribs. Naturally, you'll have to take it easy. No hanging around the rafters."

"But I'm the ghost."

Edward chuckled. "They had you in a harness, right?" I nodded an affirmative. "We'll see how long you stay in that harness with your ribs like this."

Was he implying that I was somehow lacking in fortitude? How the hell did he think that I had managed to put up with him for so long? "I hope you aren't suggesting that mere physical pain has the ability to stop art."

"Ghosts and zombies are art?"

"You deal with the depths of human depravity every day. I wouldn't expect you to understand." I saw to it that my tone simply dripped with disdain.

"I thought that human suffering was the source of all beauty."

"Only when left in the hands of someone with an ability to appreciate the sublime."

"I can appreciate the sublime."

"Ha!"

"Are you questioning my ability to appreciate the sublime?"

"A person who deals in the mundane all day long cannot possibly develop a true appreciation for the sublime."

"I would dispute that, but here's a list of things you should and shouldn't do." Checking his wristwatch, Edward paused. "You're good to go. I'll talk to you tonight, right?"

He meant on the phone. I was determined to cease and desist all such communications, and today's fiasco had not changed my decision, but I preferred that he find this out for himself as he gradually realized that I'd stopped taking his calls. So I shrugged ambiguously (and painfully) and thanked him for his efforts on my behalf, as Miss Post would have recommended. He left me to redress—after I turned down his offer of assistance—and I moved slowly, the shattered remnants of my dignity stuffed into my purse along with my bra.

Decent once more, I left the shelter of my curtained exam "room" and headed for the exit, intent upon fleeing as quickly as I could. But before I could make good on my escape, Edward loomed suddenly before me, a stupid smirk gracing his features.

"Bella, I meant to ask. Is this performance open to the public?"

Could this day get any worse? "I believe a limited number of seats are being sold to the general public," I told him through not quite gritted teeth as I eyed the empty corridor.

He grinned. "Awesome."

Son of a bitch. I spun around, absolutely through with Edward and his one-horse hospital, and promptly collided with an elderly gentleman who was, fortunately, far sturdier than he looked. He put his hands on my shoulder to steady me as I tried not to let any tears leak from my eyes at the pain of the sudden impact.

"I'm so sorry, dear. Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," I croaked, then cleared my voice. "It was my fault anyhow."

"Bella," Edward asked, "are you sure you're okay?"

"This is Bella?" the victim of my haste inquired and I narrowed my eyes, pain disappearing as I readied for a fight, my hands balling into fists. Had Edward been talking to someone about me?

The gentleman in question smiled and held out a hand for me to shake. "It's such a pleasure to meet Edward's Bella."

_Edward's_ Bella? I decided to play along, shaking the fellow's hand and glancing back at Edward who was nervously running his hand through his hair. _That's right, fucker. I'm on to you._  
>"Bella, this is Marcus," Edward introduced us.<p>

"She's even lovelier than you said," Marcus guffawed.

Aha! I _knew_ that I was being set up.

"Of course you must bring her with you to dinner tomorrow night," Marcus told Edward.

He must? Why? Just what did this dinner entail? I imagined a _Twilight Zone_-esque dialogue pitting good versus evil around a banquet table, my head on a plate.

Edward seemed unsure. "I—Marcus we can't just impose on her like this."

"Nonsense. A new perspective would do us good. Bring her with you. If you don't, I just might not open the door." Marcus winked at me—_winked!—_and continued on down the corridor.

I glowered at Edward.

"You don't have to come," he hedged.

"You don't want me to come?" Why the fuck not? I ignored, for the moment, the irrationality of being angry that I was being uninvited to a dinner where I'd imagined my head on a plate.

"No. I mean, you can come. You should come if you want to. It's just—Marcus is a bit odd."

"_Texas Chainsaw Massacre _odd or just Victor Fargas odd?" I had to admit that I was a bit intrigued to see Edward so uncomfortable. And who was this guy he'd been talking to about me?

"Victor Fargas?" Edward asked.

"The poor guy with just a handful of books left in his collection in the empty mansion in _The Ninth Gate_."

"I feel like I understand less than half of what you say."

"You've never seen _The Ninth Gate_?" I was horrified.

"Yeah, I did. Lena Olin. But I hardly remember anything else."

"I have a theory that everyone you meet is someone from _The Ninth Gate_. Most people want to be Jonny Depp or Frank Langella. But I'm the poor guy with just a few books and a stupid house left to my name."

Edward cocked his head to one side. "That's really sad."

"It's a curse. I'd have sold the house and kept the books, but it's been in my family for hundreds of years." My _Ninth Gate-_self loved books just as much as I did.

"You and Marcus might get along really well actually."

"I don't have to come if you don't want me there," I hedged, conscious after all of the imposition.

"No, it's not that. It's just," Edward shook his head, trying to put whatever he was trying to say into words.

He was cut short by his pager going off. "Shit, Bella, I've got to go," Edward said just as all hell broke loose. A gurney was suddenly racing down the previously empty hallway, ringed with flying monkeys in scrubs. I hurried out of the way as Edward rushed over and began barking out questions in a language I didn't understand.

_My goodness_, I thought, watching Edward in action as he started giving orders. Perhaps he did do some useful work after all.

I stymied that thought before it could confuse me further, and fled back to the safety of my university.

It turned out that I did answer the phone when Edward called that night, but I told myself that it was only because I wanted to meet this Marcus and find out just what Edward had been saying about me behind my back.

When Edward picked me up the following afternoon, it had already started to rain, a nice steady downpour, with rolling thunderclouds making day into night and a loud rumble every once in a while. I smiled, gazing out of the window as the water streaked over the glass.

"You like the rain?" Edward asked.

"I _love_ it."

He snorted. "Of course you do."

"What does that mean?"

"You always do the opposite of what I expect."

"I do not care to be subject to the expectations of others."

"That's obvious. Rain makes the traffic worse."

"The traffic's always bad. At least this way there's raindrops to smear the view. It's like living in a Dali painting, in a good way. How do you know Marcus?"

"He used to be an ME, a medical examiner, at the hospital."

I sensed again Edward's discomfort—the same anxiety that he'd expressed when Marcus first extended the invitation—and I wondered why he was so uneasy. Was he upset over the prospect of me becoming more and more involved with his life? Why had he been talking about me with Marcus in the first place? Why hadn't he simply told me that I wasn't welcome? I would have understood.

Whatever the case, Edward changed the subject, asking if I was still planning to dangle from the rafters of a theater for the sake of art. In point of fact the university had decided that an ethereal phantom in the second act was too much of a liability and that I should just come up from a trap door, but I didn't want to give Edward the satisfaction of knowing that yet, so I just huffed and asked if I was being driven all of the way to Canada.

It so happened that Marcus did live in the state of Washington, if not very close at hand. His manse was located in the middle of a densely wooded patch of ground, for he was not a fan of the city, it seemed, which I could completely understand, not being overly fond of crowds myself. Yet even I was taken aback when Edward stopped in front of the cemetery.

**AN: Check out ficsisters dot com (International House of Fanfic). I'm reviewing _The Nymph and the Waterfall_ by Pastiche Pen tomorrow. Many thanks to ficsisters for having me!**

**REVIEWERS FOR THE ABOVE CHAPTER OF _GOTHIC_ RECEIVE AN ALICE AND JASPER OUTTAKE. Please note that I can't send outtakes to Guest reviewers. Please sign-in to receive an outtake.**

**I've added an offer for an outtake to the bottom of chapter 2 (chapter 3 according to fanfiction's dropdown menu): Mr. Berty the English teacher from ten years ago. I'm not convinced it's worth having, but if you do want it, please PM me or mention it in a review and I'll send it along. It hasn't got any details on the murder.**

**In case you are wondering, we are a little over halfway through this story. There are 23 "regular" chapters – that is, according to my chapter headings, not fanfiction's dropdown.**

**I made up the ghost's activities in the de Lorde skit above, though I assume that he must have included something of the sort in at least one of his plays.**

_**Grand Guignol**_**—put on grisly plays, many of which were written by de Lorde. Alas, it's closed now.**

'…**deprecating their worst, but defying, almost desiring it, in the terrible and indefinite curiosity of despair**_**….' **_**is Charles Robert Maturin**

**Rec: Between Us by Nuttyginger **He was the same and different all in one body. The boy I had once loved had turned into a man...temptation in a tie, had swagger for days...and a curious British lilt that makes my insides tumble. Could we ever be what we were or am I just completely screwed? AH, ExB Rated: M - English - Drama/Romance - Chapters: 18 - Words: 98,701 - Reviews: 769 - Favs: 733 - Follows: 896 - Updated: Feb 9, 2013 - Published: Aug 18, 2012 - Edward, Bella - Complete

**Happy New Year!**


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